Legal - Intellectual Property
Trademarks

Trademarks

You automatically have some protection for your trademark if you were the first person to use that trademark in commerce, even if you did not register your trademark.

However, many small businesses get into trouble by doing an inadequate trademark search. They often, although inadvertently, use a name already employed by another firm. You should hire an attorney to do a trademark search for you, especially if you intend to do business on a national basis. There are also commercial firms that provide trademark search services and/or offer access to their electronic trademark databases.

Trademarks do not necessarily offer protection across the nation, let alone internationally. Typically, they cover those geographic regions in which the trademark is being used. They also generally don’t cover multiple classes of goods, but only the class of goods the trademark is being used in. For example, if you operate a local retail business called Big Balloons in the state of New York, it would not necessarily be in conflict with a retail store operating in California under the same name. Similarly, if a Big Balloon Flying School were to open in New York, it would not be in conflict with the Big Balloon store because the type of product being offered is noncompetitive.

If you are going to use your trademark nationally, you should register it with the U.S. federal government. Contact the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. You can also seek protection for your trademark in individual states, but it is much weaker than federal registration. You will have to seek separate protection from every foreign country you want trademark

protection in.

If you obtain federal registration in the United States, you should use the registered trademark symbol at the end of the mark. But you may not use this symbol until and unless the federal registration has been issued.

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You cannot using someone else’s trademark. Additionally, you need to make sure your trademark doesn’t bear any resemblance to another firm’s trademark in order to avoid confusion.

In order for trademarks to offer protection the copy cannot be merely descriptive of your function or product. For example, “Bicycle Store” would not offer trademark protection, but “The Merry Cycle Place” probably would. The validity of a trademark is subject to many variables. One examiner at the federal trademark office may have one opinion regarding the validity of a trademark application, and another examiner an entirely different opinion. So if your trademark registration or creation is important to you, consider hiring a specialized attorney.