If you have a question (particularly a tough-one) not addressed in our frequently asked questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
Policing your trademark is an important task for maintaining the strength of your trademark rights. There are passive and active approaches:
- Waiting until instances of confusion arise between your brand and that of a third party.
- Periodically searching the Internet and industry for potentially infringing brands.
If your trademark has real value, you’ll want to proactively monitor the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office trademark application filings to determine if anyone is seeking rights to a confusingly similar brand. It is difficult for even the most experienced trademark attorneys to do this manually because one must look not just for “identical” trademarks, but those with:
- phonetic similarity;
- orthographic similarity and misspellings;
- prefix, infix and suffix variations;
- vowel and consonant similarity;
- plurals and stemming;
- abbreviations and acronyms; and
- other similarities
Well-informed brand owners and intellectual property practitioners set up sophisticated trademark watch services for an annual fee. Every 1-2 weeks, the monitor queries trademark databases in the U.S., Europe and in other countries for newly filed applications that could infringe the trademark owner’s rights.
