Trademark professionals often warn our clients to be skeptical when they receive official seeming bills or notices offering pricey and unneeded trademark related services. These scams have been around for as long as I have been practicing trademark law. There are periodic attempts to combat the practice by our community with warnings (we blogged about
What Do Trademark Symbols Symbolize?
The short answer is that ™ is supposed to mean someone just thinks something is a trademark. ® is supposed to mean that a government trademarking authority has agreed that it could be a trademark and has issued a registration certificate.
Getting your trademark
US TMs: Use ’em or Lose ’em
In the United States, unlike overseas, you get a lot of legal protection right away simply by coming up with a brand name and USING it to sell goods and services. USE is the crucial issue here.
This means that we trademark attorneys spend a lot of time thinking about how to prove that our
Con Artists Roll Out The Red Carpet To Trademark Owners
Registering your brand name as a trademark domestically or internationally can be a long, confusing process involving obscure governmental agencies requiring various fees at seemingly random intervals. Some of these demands are legitimate (International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization notification that payment of a 2nd part fee is due in Swiss francs): but
Marijuana Will Soon be Legal in Half of the United States But Not Trademarkland
This week eight of the nine states voting on the issue said yes to cannabis decriminalization but the USPTO continues to say no.
Trademarkland takes a hard line against drugs, refusing to register any trademarks linked to cannabis. If anything, it has gotten even stricter on this issue over time. The law animating the USPTO,
Step Carefully To Avoid Fraud in Trademark Land
It makes complete sense that a brand owner shouldn’t be able to lie to the Trademark Office when it tried to register its brand name as a trademark. Let there be consequences for making false statements! But it is not always that easy to avoid the fraud cow pie.
For example, when you file an