Archives: Trademarks

So you’ve discovered that someone is infringing on your trademark. Now what do you do? My clients often find that some other person or business is infringing on their trademark rights. They’re then faced with deciding what to do about it. Ownership of a trademark (whether or not it’s been registered with a trademark office such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office) gives the owner, in many cases, the right to prevent competitors from using an identical or confusingly similar mark. By “trademark” or “mark”, I’m referring to anything that identifies you as the source of your goods…

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A recent article in the New York Times detailed Apple’s aggressive approach to trademark protection. The headline didn’t hesitate to call Apple out for bullying, and I think that’s the right term to use. The article begins with a story of “one of dozens of entrepreneurs, small businesses and corporations that Apple has gone after in recent years for applying to trademark names with the word ‘apple’ or logos of stemmed fruit.” It goes on to note that “Apple has frequently targeted entities that have nothing to do with tech or that are infinitesimal in size. It has even set…

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In October 2021, Facebook announced that it was changing the name of their company to “Meta”. Conflicts have already started to pop up around the brand name. It’s hard to imagine Facebook just assumed that a reasonably common four-letter word was fully available and nobody was using it in connection with related goods or services. Did they fail to do their due diligence, or do they just not care?       The key issue at the moment, in the U.S. at least, is the prior pending United States Patent and Trademark Office trademark application for META for “Computers, laptops…

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What does it mean when someone asks me to “trademark” a brand for them? First, of course, you need to know what a “trademark” is (for a review, check out my page What Is A Trademark?). Basically, it’s anything that identifies you or your company as the source of goods and services. Common trademarks include brand names, business names, logos, and taglines. Typically, when someone reaches out to me to assist with trademark protection, what they’re thinking about is filing an application to register their mark as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. From my perspective…

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