Protecting fictional characters through Trademark and Copyright

Protecting fictional characters through Trademark and Copyright

It's critical for content creators to understand how to protect their characters under intellectual property law. In the United States, the two most relevant forms of IP protection for fictional characters are copyright and trademark. courts have long recognized that sufficiently distinctive characters are entitled to copyright protection. The seminal case on character copyrights is Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., where Judge Learned Hand articulated the now famous "sufficiently delineated" test.