Provides legal protection for your brand. It helps protect you against counterfeiting and fraud. The main purpose of a brand is to avoid unfair competition between companies that use consumer confusion to get more business. For example, if an independent restaurant used an arched gold M as a logo, it could confuse customers who think the establishment is a McDonald's.
Causing this type of confusion is against trademark law. A trademark protects the specific and unique name, logo, and symbols that belong to its products or trademark. Trademark protection can apply to trade names, symbols, logos, sounds, and even colors that are emblematic of a specific brand. Rights to a trademark may be lost due to abandonment, improper granting or assignment, or genericity.
A trademark is abandoned when its use is discontinued with the intention of not resuming it. That intention can be deduced from the circumstances. In addition, failure to use for three consecutive years is prima facie proof of abandonment. The basic idea is that trademark law only protects brands that are used, and parties have no right to store potentially useful marks.
Thus, for example, a recent case argued that the Los Angeles Dodgers had abandoned trademark rights to the Brooklyn Dodgers Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. Sed Non Olet Denarius, Ltd. For example, the Nike brand, along with the Nike swoosh, identifies shoes manufactured by Nike and distinguishes them from shoes manufactured by other companies (for example, some small business entrepreneurs are discouraged from using trademarks because they think the process is too complex. In some circumstances, trademark protection can go beyond words, symbols and phrases to include other aspects of a product, such as its color or packaging.
In fact, trademark protections vary on a four-point scale, so it's important to consider your company name. The registration constitutes a nationwide constructive notice to others that the trademark is the property of the party. The first way is to file the trademark application yourself, which can be very frustrating if you don't understand the legal terms and other information found in the application. First, you want to find a trademark that you can use publicly that identifies your products or services while remaining distinctive to differentiate yourself from the rest.
You'll also need to conduct your own trademark search to make sure that no one else is using it. Other courts have held that the First Amendment effectively exceeds trademark law, in certain circumstances. Therefore, to meet these objectives, India has strengthened its trademark law and updated its legal system accordingly. However, unlike patents, trademark registrations can be renewed from time to time for as long as you want.
Without conducting a thorough search, you risk infringing someone else's trademark and having to defend yourself in court. A trademark is any word, name, symbol or design, or any combination thereof, that is used in commerce to identify and distinguish the products of one manufacturer or seller from those of another and to indicate the origin of the products. The rules of practice governing federal trademark applications are codified by the Lanham Act and under Title 37, Part 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).
