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TRADEMARKS

Trademark Law Protects Your Brand

Trademark law protects branding. Think of a trademark as an adjective describing the source of a product or service. It is not, “I’ll have a Coke®”; more precisely, it should be, “I’ll have a Coke® brand cola beverage.” Coke®, as a trademark does not signify the actual beverage, it signifies who makes and sells a particular brand of beverage. Trademarks may be any device, a name, logos, sound, color, really anything at all, so long as it functions to identify the source of a product or service.

Trade dress is a subset of trademarks that protects the overall look and feel. Perhaps the overall color scheme and decoration of a store. Without ever seeing a sign with the name, just by the look and feel of the store (the orange shelving of a Home Depot®), you know exactly what brand of store you are in.

If a trademark becomes so ubiquitous that it no longer identifies the source of the product, but actually is the product (Aspirin, for example), then the trademark is said to have become generic and is no longer protectable, but free for anyone to use. Some companies have branched out in products mostly to prevent exactly that. Post It®, for example, offers much more than only ‘sticky note pads’.

I can help you choose desirable marks, weak versus strong marks, provide guidance on availability versus likelihood that someone else may claim you are infringing their mark, and then help with getting Registered. I perform trademark searching, render opinion letters, file trademark applications, maintain registrations, and assist in protecting trademarks through cease and desist letters and filing and defending actions at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and Trademark and Trial Appeal Board as well as the State and Federal Courts.

trademarks

Trademarks completed in 2015

Contact Me

Baldini Law, LLC
12557 Leatherleaf Drive
Tampa, Florida 33626
(973) 945-1645
jack@baldinilaw.com