With the proliferation of unregulated Internet
services, new sources of threat to your Intellectual Property (IP)
have come about. They include using your IP in their domain names,
in keyword search-engine advertising, and in third-level domain
names (such as YourTrademark.blogger.com) through free blogs.
A trademark is a venue
to protect your IP. Its purpose is to prevent others from diluting
the value of your intangible assets.
With regard to domain-name
registrations, courts have ruled in favor of owners of strong trademarks
against cybersquatters. More recently, some of the major search
engines have also sided with trademark owners, such as AOL, to stop
accepting keyword advertisers’ listings that violate trademarks.
However, third-level domain-name trademark violations still go unnoticed.
To protect your intellectual
property, you first have to trademark your keywords and phrases.
To claim a trademark, you don’t need to go through an expensive
registration process with the USPTO (U. S. Patent and Trademark
Office). You only need to place a TM, for trademark, or SM, for
service mark, behind the keywords that you need protected. The second
step is to make sure that no one else is using the trademark. To
do that, you need to submit your entry to the TM-it database for
a nominal fee of $20 for your first five listings.
TM-it helps common-law trademark owners protect their trademarks inexpensively.
It also acts as a one-stop source of trademark information for USPTO,
European, Canadian, and common-law trademarks. If, instead, you
query a search engine for a specific TM, the result, unlike using
TM-it, does not authenticate the first claimed user of the TM. Furthermore,
Google, the most popular search engine, does not have all Web pages
indexed, as a recent study by DomainMart revealed. |
