To complete the legal analysis a bit more rigorously, mostly because I’m drunk and bored on Thanksgiving:
- The service name “continue and persist” is probably trademarkable by them if they wanted (assuming it’s not already in use). And as you point out, formal registration wouldn’t be necessary, although it does come with various benefits. Doing so could block someone from creating a similar service with the same or confusingly similar name.
- For copyright, reproduction doesn’t have to be verbatim to infringe. The standard is typically substantial similarity. So you couldn’t just change a few words here or there in the letter.
- Publicly disclosed concepts can be protected under US law, but you have to go through patent law. Haven’t done a prior art search, but seems unlikely that there’s much patentable here. There is also the section 101 (abstract idea) issue, but that is hard to evaluate without looking at the exact patent claims at issue.
- The service name “continue and persist” is probably trademarkable by them if they wanted (assuming it’s not already in use). And as you point out, formal registration wouldn’t be necessary, although it does come with various benefits. Doing so could block someone from creating a similar service with the same or confusingly similar name.
- For copyright, reproduction doesn’t have to be verbatim to infringe. The standard is typically substantial similarity. So you couldn’t just change a few words here or there in the letter.
- Publicly disclosed concepts can be protected under US law, but you have to go through patent law. Haven’t done a prior art search, but seems unlikely that there’s much patentable here. There is also the section 101 (abstract idea) issue, but that is hard to evaluate without looking at the exact patent claims at issue.