Protect Your Brand At All Cost
(Or Almost No Cost)
Nowadays, branding seems like a cliché term but it is still an integral part of everybody’s business. It represents a person or company’s reputation. A distinction from everyone else. In the U.S., the state of law protects consumers from product and service confusion by granting the owner of a brand exclusive rights over their trademark. A trademark typically protects brand names and logos used on goods and services. It excludes others from using your name or logo on other similar products, safeguarding your potential clients from acquiring an unintended item. The trademark or service mark identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.
Brands and trademarks are a type of intellectual property, meaning they represent a form of value. Trademark=Money. Although very hard to assign a price tag, a carefully curated brand may be worth billions. Therefore, it’s on everybody’s best interest to preserve to the upmost their name and design.
But, before you go running to your favorite lawyers (maybe?) or the USPTO, know that the U.S. system practices a first-to-use doctrine. Under this doctrine, the first party to make a valid use in commerce of the mark is the one that preserves the rights, even if they do not pursue a trademark registration. Although this is a brand life saver, this does not, by any means, signify that an organization should avoid registering their service mark or trademark. By filing your trademark early, you might help save your business a ton of headaches and lawyer fees.
Owning a federal trademark registration provides a number of significant advantages over not filing one, including a legal presumption of your ownership of the mark and your exclusive right to use the mark in connection with your specific goods and services registered. It constitutes a public notice of your ownership of said mark, alerting others not to try anything funny. Plus, you get to use the cool ® logo.
Filing a trademark costs a small fraction of what a cancellation procedure might incur, and much less than a dispute over trademark infringement. So it is wise to follow the words of the Shaolin grandmasters themselves: “You best protect ya neck!” (FYI: Expert brand strategists Wu-tang Clan have been known to interchangeably use the term neck for brand, or at least I think so.)
