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Welcome to another edition of the Legal River podcast, a weekly look at the laws and legal
issues facing small to medium size businesses.
Hello. I'm Cliff Hyra. I'm the managing member of Hyra IP, an intellectual property law office
specializing in obtaining patents, trademarks and copyrights. I'm gonna teach you a little
about trademarks, basically what they are and why you should care. Now I'm gonna start
by giving you a few examples of trademarks that you're probably familiar with. Here's
one, the Apple logo. That's a very famous trademark. Nike, the word Nike, another very
famous trademark. The Nike swoosh. And here is the Gillette slogan, The Best A Man Can
Get. All of these are trademarks.
Trademark is anything that you use to distinguish your products and services from others. You
want to form an association in your customer's mind between your business and the product
or the service that you're providing. You want to create a good experience for your
customers and you want them to associate that good experience with you to know who gave
them that good experience and where they can go to get some more. So people know that branding
is essential. It's essential to marketing and it's essential to building your business
and growing your business. But what many people do not realize is that trademarks are governed
by a strict set of laws and that legal considerations are essential when you're selecting a name,
any kind of product name, a logo, slogan, anything that you're using for your products.
The law protects the right of the first business to use a given trademark within a certain
geographical area to exclude any other businesses in a similar industry from using that mark
or anything that would be confusingly similar.
There's two reasons that the law offers this protection. The first one is consumer confusion.
If two businesses are using the same trademark in similar industries, that's gonna be very
confusing for the customers. They're not gonna know which company is producing the products
that they're buying. They're not gonna know who to call to complain to, to return their
product, to ask for service, technical support. And it's a situation that the law tries to
avoid this confusion in the marketplace.
The second reason is unfair competition. Let's take an example, the Apple logo, very famous,
well known for the high quality, the service that's provided by the Apple Computer Company.
So a new business that's coming out manufacturing computers, of course they would love to use
the Apple logo because people are going to associate them with the quality of Apple.
They may be confused and think that they are Apple. And so people that are looking for
Apple computers may go to them. It's an instant source of customers. It's great for them,
but it's not fair for Apple. And it's going to damage Apple's reputation because the quality
and the service of this brand new business probably is not as good. So both of those
things are policies that are served by the laws that protect exclusive trademark rights
to the first person to begin using them.
So you can see that there's a legal issue here when you're picking your name or your
logo, you can't just think about the creative considerations, you have to also consider,
is this going to infringing on anyone else's trademark rights. You should at least do some
research to see if anybody else in a similar industry is already using a similar name or
logo. You want to try to avoid those because if you do pick a name like that, that existing
business can come after you to make you use a different name, or even for monetary damages.
But there's also an additional consideration which is that recognizing that it's difficult
to do really thorough research of all the local businesses and what marks they're using.
There's been created a federal trademark register. And that is a list, a nationwide list of active
trademarks. Now of course you want to include this list in your research. It makes it much
easier to find marks that may be conflicting with your own. But it also introduces the
consideration of whether you want to place your own mark on this list. And putting your
mark on the list has a number of advantages. It gives you nationwide rights to use the
mark instead of just limited by geographic scope. That's very important. It makes it
easier for other people to find your mark when they're picking their own name and to
avoid any conflict with yourself. It allows you to use the registration symbol when you're
putting your mark on your goods. You can use the little R with a circle around it. It's
a little professional looking and it makes it a lot easier for you to enforce your rights.
So anybody who's involved in working with new businesses or new branding, new product
lines or services, or any kind of new marketing campaign, needs to have a basic understanding
of the trademark laws. You should be at least doing a trademark search any time you're coming
up with a new logo or brand name. And you should really think about whether it may be
beneficial to you, worth the cost to file for federal trademark registration. It's not
just a creative and interesting name and logo, although that's very important. But what's
also important is avoiding expensive legal conflicts and ensuring that you're able to
protect your brand name and avoid unfair competition.
Thank you very much. This has been a discussion of trademarks, what they are and why you should
care about them. Again, I'm Cliff Hyra with Hyra IP, an intellectual property law office.
You can find more information about my firm at HyraIP.com. If you have any questions about
this podcast or trademarks in general, you can contact me directly at the contact information
on my website, or Podcasts@LegalRiver.com. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this edition of the Legal River podcast. If you have a business
law question you would like to see answered in a podcast, please email us at Podcast@LegalRiver.com.
To reiterate, all views expressed in this presentation are intended only as a general
discussion of the issues and should not be regarded as legal advice. For additional details
or advice about a specific situation, please consult legal counsel directly.
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