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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised by how confused people get about various types of "intellectual property" because they're actually quite different. I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure it varies from one part of the world to another, but generally...

Patents apply to inventions. Think: methods of doing something to achieve a particular application.

Trademarks apply to things associated with a brand or product. Think: logos, "the Intel sound", the pattern of colours used in the Google logo, the brand name used, particular characters, etc.

I think there can be a little bit of overlap between these, in that a logo might be trademark and also might be a copyrighted work, but generally the distinctions are fairly clear.

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Well you can't trademark, patent, or copyright fonts. Nor can you do that for fashion (clothing/bags/shoes).

So the companies that make these things, in order to exploit the legal regime for profit, work around it. Such as Louis Vuitton or Nike shoes using trademarks as part of their styling. The fashion isn't copyrightable, but if you were to copy it you would violate their trademarks.

These laws are very arbitrary. Much more than the marketing for them suggests.

For example:

> Patents apply to inventions. Think: methods of doing something to achieve a particular application.

Patents, in the most literal sense, are just algorithms.

They are a series of rules that must be followed to achieve certain "inventions" or solve problems in a particular way.

People read patent's summary describing the invention and think that is the patent. It is not. The actual "meat" of the patent is the series of steps needed to achieve that invention.

The idea that software can both be patentable AND copyrightable just goes to show just how far off the rails the whole "IP" stuff is.

"Well you can't trademark, patent, or copyright fonts."

In the US. They can be protected in the UK, Germany and France.

And you can copyright the digital font file in the US, but you can't keep someone from tracing the letters and making their own identical version.

Yes you can, by taking out a design patent.

I would say that patents and copywrite are orthogonal.

A patent, hopefully, captures a truely new and original idea. Where as as copywrite encompass actual work.

One huge problem with patentable ideas is that the idea should not obvious to those in the field, but intails a proof by contradiction. If the idea was obvious to one person, surely it was obvious to many. And is more clearly obvious to anyone who has seen the idea.

Trade marks are only to protect branding, they stop mimicry that doesn’t violate copyright.

Trade secrets are the real secret sauce. They are legally protected and by definition are unpatenable. It’s the only way to keep a competitive edge.

fortunately for me I hate clothing with logos visible. why would I want to pay someone to advertise for them? I get the others do it to show off their wealth or taste.

This is a modern scourge. I hate it. It's everywhere.

There's absolutely no reason to have visible logos anywhere on clothing or other items unless they're paying you.

I mean, it's literally the 70's game "Mastermind" but with letters instead of colours, so any patents are out the window and copyright is dubious at best..

Patent a car? 'Tis but a carriage with engine!

Cars famous for being produced by a single company.

Cars or whatever, I claim that's a significant "but"

I believe they would have only been able to copyright the actual sequence of words, not the mechanics of the game.

There is (was?) a Word Mastermind. I have a set. Here’s a picture from the internet: https://jouets-retro.fr/3257-thickbox_default/word-mastermin...

And a TV show in France called Motus since forever.

There's no copyright to the rules of the game itself, but its implementation as a work of Javascript is certainly copyrightable, in the same way that the manual of a board game is copyrightable.

There may also be a copyright interest in the "target" and "guessable" word lists as collections, but I'm not certain of the applicable subtleties.

And the word list & order is definitely copyrightable. But you could probably argue that a list of historic wordles is a factual data set and thus exempt from copyright.

I don't think that's fair. It might be mastermind to anyone who can't speak English - but the gameplay feels very different (and is: it's not about guessing a random sequence, it's about guessing a word based on clues).

It's much closer to hangman.

A game like Wordle seems fall more or less halfway between a copyright and a patent. There is a lot of gray area on this one.

It feels to me like it could be "IP" from multiple angles:

The name could be a trademark.

The UI treatment could potentially be trademarked.

The implementation could be copyrighted.

The game mechanics could be patented. (not 100% sure how effective this would be, especially since there might be prior art, and since as a game it may not be a useful invention)

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