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I’m always asked by small companies that come on in, “I’ve been using my trademark in the marketplace for five years. Why should I bother getting a registration?” And my answer is very simple, you hate when you find out two years later that somebody down the road, maybe even upstate, opened up a similar Read More

I get asked “Should I register my trademark and where should I register my trademark?” and my question is or my answer is more specifically, you have two options, you can file with the state of Florida or you can file with the federal government let’s look at the advantage of filing and actually registering Read More

Now, what’s the advantage of having a federal registration? Well, there’s a database that registers all marks. Now, when somebody comes along and starts using their own mark and it’s similar to yours, they can’t plead ignorance of not knowing the existence of your mark because it’s in one of these registers. It’s available for Read More

When you get a federal registration, you have an automatic valid trademark. That means once you register it, it’s assumed you’ve gone through all the hoops and that is valid. And what that means is if you’re ever in a legal issue, you don’t have to prove you have a trademark. You simply have to Read More

To get a trademark registration, everyone comes up and they want to have the most descriptive word they can. But if you get too descriptive, you’re picking a generic word. It’s simply not registrable. However, if you make a nonsense word and use that as your trademark, and we’ll give you an example to understand Read More

There’s always the fear that somebody’s going to put in a domain name and use your same trademark as a domain name. First of all, yes, if you get a trademark, it is bright, behooves you to go ahead and instantly register for the domain name. It’ll prevent future fights. Even my own firm’s trademark Read More

One of the values of a trademark, it’s called branding. Once your mark becomes popular in the marketplace and people associate that mark with a quality product and a desired product, that makes your branding more valuable. You have a registered trademark with that brand, that is tangible asset that you can franchise, license, of Read More

When one files a trademark, one files on identification of goods or services, you have a listing. If I am a company and I sell product A and I trademark product A and I now venture out and I want to now sell product B and there’s no real relationship between products A and B. Read More

I’m a successful trademark company and I have a fairly large portfolio of trademarks, 50 to 100 of them. That gets to be a little bit unwielding. The question becomes, how do I make mistakes and I lose my trademarks? Okay, first of all, the most obvious loss of a trademark is I don’t use Read More

Now, another way to lose the mark is I don’t police my mark in a marketplace. For instance, I become aware of a few other companies that are using my mark, but I say, eh, doesn’t bother me. Either it’s not that close or it’s a big enough marketplace, or maybe they’re on a different Read More