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Dear Abbie

Do You have questions about something your dog is or is not doing... send me an email and I'll be happy to provide a solution to your question.

Abbie

 

Abbie's IssuesAbbie's Issues...

On Your MARK

Just how important is your business name and logo? Is it essential to how you market/ “brand” your business?  If it is important, I suggest you look into trademarking it.
By having an LLC, I thought my name, “Dogs on the Run”, was safe. During the process of forming my LLC, none of the attorneys I consulted mentioned the need for a trademark. I never gave it much thought until recently when I received an email message from a business owner demanding  that I “immediately cease and desist from offering for sale, selling, advertising, marketing and/or promoting any unauthorized services” using the name “Dogs on the Run” because they had registered it. I couldn’t believe what I just read. As much as I loathed spending the money, I had to enlist the services of an attorney to prevent future problems.

So that you don’t have to go through the same expense and the upset, let me share a few of the things I learned from this experience.

First you need to understand the difference between a copyright and a trademark.  A copyright, denoted as ©, is a guarantee of an exclusive set of rights granted to the author or creator of an original work; things like music, writing, artwork, photographs, and other "original works of authorship."  Copyright protection is automatic and may last for over 100 years. In other words, one does not copyright a business name.

Then there is a service mark.  Service marks are used to identify just services rather than products or products and services together.  Service marks (SM) are generally treated the same as trademarks.

That leads us to trademarks. A trademark is “a word, symbol, or phrase, used to identify a particular manufacturer or seller's products and distinguish them from the products of another”.  It protects "words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods”.

A trademark can be obtained either by being the first to use it or by registering it. It is difficult to prove that you have used a name first if it has not been used as a trademark (either officially or unofficially).

A registered trademark® is governed by the strongest rules and strengthens your rights to a given name should you need to defend your rights to use it. To obtain a registered trademark you need to file an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office after you have identified your goods and services, searched the database of official trademarks, and decided how to depict your “mark”.  This is a lengthy process and can be costly.

To acquire an unofficial trademark start adding the TM symbol to your mark for a trademark and SM for a service mark.  It is easy enough to do.  If only someone had told me.

In either case to use your trademark effectively:

Distinguish your mark – capitalize, italicize, boldface, put it in quotes or underline it.
Make sure to affix your mark to all uses of your name – all ads, clothing, handouts, products, etc.

I am not an attorney and do not claim to have a legal grasp of this issue but I do know that it is important for your business to protect your brand. 

As a group, “we” dog trainers could do a better job of “taking care of business”.  This is one issue that we should not lightly shrug off.