Trademark Watch School 1 of 3 – Why monitor registered trademarks?

This is the first out of three lessons in our campaign to raise awareness about the importance of protecting one’s trademarks in order to avoid business critical risks. Consider this the soft start.

Background

Let us start from the beginning. As we all know, a trademark (not a brand) is simply a registered intellectual property right aimed at providing the holder with exclusivity to a company’s “attributes”, such as a symbol, word, tagline and more. It is common to confuse trademarks with other rights such as patents (the exclusive rights to the technical solution to a problem) and design protection (a product’s look). The expression “but I have patented that trademark” is not rarely overheard.

Why monitor a registered trademark?

Firstly, the word ”monitor” needs to be defined. There are many ways to monitor a brand. However, the methods can be divided into montoring the use of a brand (legitimate as well as illegitimate) and monitoring other trademark applications. Even though monitoring other’s use of your brand is important, we will be focusing on monitoring other trademark applications. This is the most fundamental of all trademark watches, for reasons we will be elaborating in newsletters to come.

In short, monitoring a trademark aims to maintain the exclusivity to a brand, that exclusivity that was the sole purpose of registering the trademark from the beginning.

If you have any questions on the monitoring of trademarks, or any other trademark related questions for that matter, just contact us today!