Trademarks and Google - A Big Help and Possibly a Trap
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. In the good old days, BG (before google) when we wanted to do a trademark search for a client, we outsourced it to a private company, which, for about $375 in 1990s dollars would send us back a printed booklet in about 4-5 days. The booklet would list “hits” from the US trademark office’s database, the telephone books from 50 or so of the largest cities, the offices of the secretary of state or other corporate record keeper for all 50 states, and from their private library of industry directories.
Even more detailed reports were available for more money, and a quicker turn around could also be bought.
And now, AG? You go online and google all variations of the name in 10 minutes, for free. And then, you zip over to the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website and do a search on registered trademarks.
All of which is easier, quicker, cheaper than the old method. But there’s a trap for the unwary. One thing the old style searches would give you was a trained searcher. Many “amateur” searchers think that you have to have an exact match to violate someone’s trademark, but that’s not true. It need only be “confusingly similar in the marketplace.”
So what’s confusingly similar? And what’s the marketplace these days. Is Zerocks a conflict with Xerox? What about Zerox?
Knowing what variations on a word to enter into your search parameters, and what names are a problem, and what names are OK is a bit of science and a bit of art. If you guess wrong, one problem may be that you apply for a trademark registration and it gets rejected because the TM office considers it confusingly similar. But that’s not really your biggest problem. The real problem is that you might not find out for 6 to 9 months and changing your name at that point is a lot more difficult than it would have been before your product launch.
And if you don’t apply for registration, which you don’t have to do, it may take even longer before a company pops up with a infringement claim.
One way a Google search is great is that it makes it cheap and easy to do regular searches to see if someone is violating your name. You don’t have to have registered your name to have a claim for trade name violation. So take a moment right now and Google your company’s name, and the name of any products. If you don’t protect your name now, you may lose the right to do so later.
