The different types of trademarks
Trademarks provide legal protection for words, symbols, phrases, logos, designs, or combinations thereof that represent the source of goods or services. There are five types of commodity trademarks: generic trademarks, descriptive trademarks, suggestive trademarks, fancy trademarks and arbitrary trademarks.
Trademarks used as your company's trademark must be unique in order to become their property. Trademarks are divided into four categories with different requirements and degrees of legal protection: arbitrary or imaginative, suggestive, descriptive, and generic.
The trademark application process
What procedure does the Trademark Office use to decide whether to grant a registration? Is the application checked for possible conflicts with other trademarks? Are Consent Forms Accepted to Resolve Third-Party Trademark Objections? Can an applicant respond to a Trademark Office refusal?
To submit a trademark application, you must provide: (1) the name and address of the applicant; (2) an accurate representation of the trademark; (3) a list of goods and/or services that use the trademark; (four) the application fee; A signed statement certifying that the applicant is the trademark owner and that no one else has the right to use the trademark in commerce.
Trademarks can take years to register
The trademark registration process can take some time - up to several years. This is mainly due to the legal requirements involved and the waiting time spend just for getting it examined. Filing with the USPTO may seem like a breeze at first, but then you have to wait for your trademark to go through each step in the process.
The USPTO filing process also involves (possibly) long hours for you to respond to each office action—and now they shortened the deadline to just 3 months, when it was 6 months, years ago!
Trademarks usually take 12 to 18 months to be approved in the U.S. Understand that the trademark process is a federal matter that can be complex, technical, and involve multiple stages. This is why many people get trademarking services to help them focus on trademarks so they can focus on building their businesses.
