Copyright is the legal right to control who may reproduce, publish, or distribute a creative work. A patent is an official government grant giving an inventor sole rights to make, use, or sell an invention for a set period. A novel is copyrighted; a new machine or process is patented.
The core difference
Copyright protects creative expression, while a patent protects an invention.
- copyright — the legal right to control reproduction, publication, or distribution of a creative work: Using the photo without permission could be a copyright violation.
- patent — an official government grant giving sole rights to an invention: She filed a patent for her new design.
How to tell them apart
Copyright covers creative works such as books, songs, and photographs, protecting the specific expression of an idea. A patent covers inventions, protecting the functional design or process itself, granted formally by a government and typically for a set period of time. That is why an author copyrights a book but an engineer patents a device.
The words can trip people up because both can be used as verbs, to copyright something or to patent it, and both involve formally securing a right. Note also that patent has an unrelated adjective sense, meaning obvious or clear to see, as in a patent lie, which has nothing to do with intellectual property.
