Trademarks

Trademarks

I just returned from a week long vacation with my daughter during her Senior College Break. We had a blast!

I want to skip over to Trademarks for this post. The government free site is fairly easy to search. It’s called TESS which stands for Trademark Electronic Search System. Here’s the link for the home page http://www.uspto.gov/index.html Navigate to the left hand tab called Trademarks, then go to tab 3 called Search TM data base (TESS).

1. Under Select the Search Form choose New User Form Search (Basic)
2. This brings your curser to the Search Term Box. Leave all the other settings alone and type in your Trademark Search Word.
3. Let’s try my brand and type in Key Largo.
4. Now look at the listing. Go to the third Key Largo item and you’ll see my application and note that it’s abandoned. That was The Underwear Maven filling out the form directly and I wasted my money.
5. Now hit the back button and look at Key Largo number 8. It’s me again and this time the application is still active and I used a lawyer. It’s still far from a done deal for me but I’m still hanging in there.
6. My problem with the first application wasn’t so much about filling out the form. It was later in the process - I couldn’t understand the questions the examiner was asking so I couldn’t answer them. It was a safer and better value to reapply with some adjustments and let my lawyer answer the follow up questions – while I took lots of notes.
7. You don’t have to have a trade mark for your brand. The trade mark is to protect the brand owner from others using your brand.
8. The government doesn’t go around trying to enforce trademark rights. If you own the trademark, you need to let others know if they are illegally using your trade mark. If they don’t stop, then you have legal recourse.

All for now! Sincerely,
The Underwear Maven
http://www.keylargounderwear.com/servlet/StoreFront