Protecting Your Trademark against Infringement

Check the search engines and register with Customs

By Mindy Toran, Freelance Writer, Mindy Toran

Protecting your company's good name is a key element of doing business. By registering your trademark, you clearly and publicly identify your products or services as being distinct from those offered by others. But simply registering your trademark isn't always enough to protect your intellectual property. You need to take an active defense to stop others from stealing or using your trademark against you. To protect your mark:

Hire a monitoring service that specializes in watching for trademark violations.
Keep an eye on how your trademark appears on search engines.
Keep an attorney on call to take quick legal action

It is up to you to take the necessary precautions to protect your business against trademark infringement. By being proactive you can prevent others from tarnishing your good name.

Hire a monitoring service

A trademark monitoring service can identify possible infringement, whether it's the use of a company name or product that can easily be confused with yours, content on a Web site or use of a similar online domain name.
Try: Monitoring services such as those provided by LegalZoom, The Intellectual Property Exchange House, The Trademark Company, and Name Protect can help identify potential trademark violations.

Watch the search engines

Regularly type your company and product names and your Web site URL into the engines – you may find competitors using your trademarks in Web site content or advertising to try to lure your customers.Ask the search engine companies to take down the ads.
Try: For a good explanation of how to handle trademark violations on search engines, see the Pay Per Click Adcenter blog.Try the complaint pages for Google and Yahoo!.

Register with Customs

With so many cheap knock-offs of brand names coming to the U.S. from overseas, it pays to register your mark with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service so Customs agents will be on the lookout.
Try: You can register online with Customs and get a certificate back.

Keep an attorney on retainer

If someone violates your trademark, you are entitled to file a lawsuit in federal court asking the court for a restraining order or injunction to prevent further violations, award monetary damages, if appropriate and, in some cases, award attorney fees.
Try: Attorneys specializing in trademark infringement can be found at AttorneyPages, LawInfo or FindLaw.

In general, you don't have to register a trademark to have it protected, but registration will help ensure that your rights and interests are protected in the case of infringement.
Names do not have to be exactly alike to constitute infringement. The owner of a trademark can stop someone from using their trademark if it is "confusingly similar" or in the case of trademark dilution, tends to weaken, blur or tarnish an existing "famous" trademark.
Trademark monitoring provides you with timely notice of any new, potentially harmful trademark applications as they become available.
While a trademark owner can oppose a trademark after it has been registered, the process is costly and time consuming. It is much easier to oppose a potentially conflicting trademark while it is still in the application stage.