If you have successfully registered a trademark, you must protect your trademark registration. This is an essential part of any company’s brand protection strategy. This article breaks down a few of the steps that a trademark owner should take to protect their trademark registration.
Why Protect Your Trademark Registration?
A company’s brand is often its single most valuable asset. A trademark registration protects the value of the company’s brand. So that means that if you have a trademark registration, you want to protect it. By doing so, you protect the value of your company’s brand and the benefits that come from having a trademark registration.
A lot of trademark owners think that once you have secured a trademark registration, the hard work is done – this is a mistake. While a registration is an important milestone, it is only the start of a process of brand protection that will last the lifetime of your company.
Protect your brand value and make sure it continues to distinguish your offering.
How Do You Protect Your Trademark Registration?
Monitor Trademark Applications
Companies of all sizes — freelancers, startups, Fortune 500 companies — monitor the United States Patent & Trademark Office for trademark filings that might be too close to their own brands. And when something comes up that could cause a problem, they take action.
But the first step is knowing when someone seeks to register a problem trademark.
Promptly Address Potential Infringements
If you don’t vigorously protect your trademark rights, you are at risk of losing them. That’s because your trademark rights are only valuable if they serve to distinguish your offering from that of your competitors or anyone else who might be confusingly similar to you.
Waiting to act on potential infringements can cause problems if you want to enforce your rights against the infringer or even against other third parties who may be using a mark that is too close to your own. This is why some companies seem overzealous when it comes to sending cease and desist letters. At the very least, they want to show that they are actively enforcing their trademark rights.
Maintain Trademark Registrations
There is no real limit to how long your trademark registration can last…provided that you maintain it properly.
Maintaining a trademark registration means making the necessary filings with the United States Patent & Trademark Office, typically at five and ten year intervals.
Failing to make the proper filings can lead your trademark registration being abandoned or it could mean missing out on other potential benefits, such as declaring “incontestability” of a trademark.
Work with Legal Counsel To Protect Your Trademark Registration
Taking care of all the things above can seem a little bit overwhelming. The good news is that it is often easier than expected to work with trademark counsel to help you take care of the above. A good trademark attorney can help you monitor trademarks, quickly respond to potential infringements and maintain trademark registrations.
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