Without a clear and protected mark on the packaging or advertising, that customer won't know from where it came. This leads to confusion and decreases the chance to gain brand loyalty. Filing a trademark application is not the same as registering your company's trade name. You must register the business name with the state in which you do business.
If your company participates in interstate commerce, you'll need to file in each state. The purpose of a trade name is for state officials to know what companies are operating within the state's borders.
This is generally for tax purposes, although it's also useful to keep track of companies that offer goods or services in each state. However, legal protection on trade names varies amonn states. In general, registering a trade name does not give you unlimited rights to exclusively use that name. Some examples of specific language include:. Other states allow legal action if another state uses the same business name you have already registered. It becomes more complicated because trade names don't hold the same legal weight as trademarks.
You may even find states that restrict trade name registration based on similarity. For example, if you opened a floral shop called "Mindy's Flowers" and someone else filed a registration for "Mindi's Flowers," the second registration might be invalid. While the spellings are different, similarity causes confusion and many states are trying to prevent that for its consumers.
Because the restrictions vary from state to state, simply registering a trade name is not enough to protect your company. A trademark protects the intellectual property of a business.
This might include logos, symbols, words, phrases, slogans, or other designs that help customers identify your company. When consumers look for products, they often rely on the trademarks to find the items they want.
Without a recognizable symbol, mark, slogan, word, logo, or other design, all products might look similar. A trade name is defined as any word or group of words used by any person to identify a sole proprietorship, firm, partnership, corporation, association, union, or other organization. Normally a trademark appears on the product or on its packaging, while a service mark appears on advertising for the services.
For example, Ford brand automobiles makes sense as a trademark, but Ford brand shareholders does not because the word is used as a trade name. Rights to trademarks and service marks generally arise under common law through use in commerce. The first user of a trademark or service mark has the right to prevent others from using the same or a confusingly similar mark or name in any manner which is likely to cause confusion among consumers, users or customers of the first user.
Rights to trade names, however, generally are based on the first to register. The Oregon Secretary of State will not register a business name which "is not distinguishable on the records. In addition to these common law rights, trademarks and service marks are often registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The function of the federal statute governing trademarks, the Lanham Act, 4 is not to grant trademark rights since those rights are secured by the common law principles but rather to provide a central clearing house for trademarks through a registration process. However, registration creates a presumption of first use and significant advantages in enforcement actions.
The state of Oregon, like most other states, also provides for registration of trademarks and service marks. Although state registration will not create the same degree of protection beyond the boundaries of the state as federal registration, registration in the state can be a cost effective precaution for a business that has a primarily local customer base.
A trade name is the official name under which an individual as a sole proprietor or a company chooses to do business. A trade name is commonly known as a doing business as DBA name. Registering a trade name legally is an important step in branding for a company, but it doesn't provide an unlimited brand name or legal protection for the use of the name. The practical function of registering a trade name is primarily for administrative and accounting purposes, such as filing a corporate tax return with the Internal Revenue Service IRS which is in addition to your personal income tax return.
The Small Business Administration SBA website provides search tool for the specific trade name registration requirements in each state. Registration requirements for trade names are really geared more toward making the tax collection agencies aware of your business than they are toward providing any substantial brand name protection.
In many states, registering a trade name doesn't prevent anyone else from operating a business under the same trade name, which explains why you may find more than one company named Joe's Painting and Roofing operating in different cities in the same state. Although registering a trade name doesn't provide legal protection in the way that registering a trademark does, selecting a trade name should still be done thoughtfully. That's because it's the initial step in establishing an identity for your company in the marketplace.
As noted above, registering a trade name doesn't give you trademark rights—that is a separate process. A trade name does not provide companies with trademark rights which is a different process altogether.
A trademark is a more significant step identified with establishing brand recognition in the marketplace. A trademark can be associated with or it can be part of your trade name and can be used to provide legal protection for the use of names, logos , symbols, or company slogans. Two easily recognized examples of trademarks are Nike's swoosh symbol and Coke's "Coca-Cola" written in its distinctive script. A trademark requires a separate registration from a trade name, and this must be done at the federal level rather than just at the state level.
The registration of a trademark guarantees an individual or business the exclusive use of the trademark, establishes legally that the trademark was not already being used by any other business entity prior to your registration of it, and provides official government protection from any other business subsequently infringing on your registered trademark.
It also provides legal liability protection against someone subsequently claiming that you are infringing on a previously registered trademark. In registering a trademark, you or your business can directly register the trademark, or you can choose to have a lawyer who handles intellectual property law or trademark registration do it for you.
Having an intellectual property lawyer handle the registration provides an extra layer of insurance that the registration is done properly and completely and that a thorough investigation has been conducted verifying that the trademark has not been previously registered by any other person or company. It is common practice to register a trademark at the state level in addition to fulfilling federal trademark registration requirements, even though the majority of states follow the guidelines of the Lanham Act—also known as the Trademark Act of —that governs federal trademark requirements.
0コメント