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question the day here today when should you trademark your business name or your logo or your brand I'm gonna tell you just a second hey my name is Jim Hart I'm the founding attorney here at Hawthorn law and you might be wondering gem why are you sitting on the floor in front of this couch with the lighting that's awful to be perfectly honest it's because I'm in our land over them at the airport and I made this stupid terrible mistake if you've ever been to the Orlando Airport they have this atrium and you can either get a room that overlooks the atrium or you get a room that overlooks the runway typically I get a room that overlooks the runway they didn't have any available I flew in early this morning I needed a nap I just I was like I need a room fit the bullet I got this room but the lighting is not nearly as good as what I'm used to in the other room check out some my older videos and you'll see how much better the lighting is in those rooms anyway not that you really care you want to know when to trademark your logo or brand hold on a second I was talking to a client yesterday I did a I've still got some spots available for next week but I opened up a consult I greatly reduced my rate from $350 an hour to $200 an hour for a limited time to open up some half-hour slots between now and Christmas so you can get a consult with me if you need to consult for $97 I'll link to the link up here to get more information on that but anyway I was having a consult with somebody who took advantage of this offer earlier this week and one of the questions we were talking about was when they should trademark their brand or their logo or whatever this is a great question the appropriate legal answer is that you should trademark your brand name as soon as you possibly can that's not always practical there's some people that that for whatever reason because the money is tight or whatever they can't do it right away but if you've got a really good idea for a brand and you want to make sure nobody else starts stealing your intellectual property you need to get that trademark as soon as possible get that puppy trademark so that would be my official legal recommendation is to anyone who asks you need to get it done as soon as possible now there's there's a couple ways that you can go about trademarking a brand especially when you're just starting out the first way is if you're actually using it to sell products or services then you can just go ahead and file a trademark application to get a trademark immediately if you're not yet using it to sell products or services but maybe you've got it on your website and you're just kind of starting to build up a business but you haven't actually used it to sell anything yet and you've got a great idea you want to make sure nobody steals it then you can file what's called a notice of use trademark application which is it's it's the same application you just check a different box in the application and basically what happens is you go through the same process then you're given a period of time where you can start using the trademark because the trademark doesn't actually provide you any protection unless you're selling a good or service and so what you get is you get you get extra time to start selling your good or service your goods or services maybe that's a better way to say that anyway you get extra time and then if within that period of time you can either file for an extension or if you start using your trademark you file a notice that you've started using the trademark and then the trademark will register and then you're good to go from there but if not then you get an extension and you've got a couple extensions so in all I'll told you can get a couple of years to basically start using that trademark and if you don't start using the trademark then you can just abandon the application and it goes back out there into the the world is anybody else care plan for that trademark if they wanted to my advice to you is if you're looking to build a business or a brand that you really want to grow and you think that you've got a really great name that that you want to protect then you want to trademark that brand or name as soon as possible I think a great example of this was and I forget her name the woman who created Spanx she didn't tell anybody about her brand for a year for at least a year there was an interview I heard where she was talking about this I'll try and link up down below to the interview with this woman it was on a podcast and she talked about how she went through methodical steps to do everything she could to protect the brand Spanx through she filing her patent application getting the process patented and her trademark and everything else as soon as she possibly could without telling anyone about what she was doing and then when a time came for her to start selling she had it all in place that's a great example of why you need to do it early because she had a great name a great concept and she wanted to make sure it was protected I'll do another a video on all the different reasons why you should trademark your brand but I just wanted to do this video to answer those questions for those of you out that are wondering when you should do it how soon you should do it if you want to do the trademark application yourself I don't recommend it but you can do it yourself if you've got a good name that's easily too tricky I just can't talk today if you've got a good name that's easy to trademark you can probably do it for the cost of the filing fee which is around three hundred dollars if you really want some legal guidance and you want to do a search and you want to figure out if anyone else is using this trademark and you want some help doing all that you've got two choices you can either hire an attorney which this is something that we do to do this for you or you can join our DIY legal program I'll include a link up here where we do a tutorial on how to trademark your brand and how to come up with a good name and all those type of things and that's something that we're going to include in that program so so there are other ways to do it they're a little bit less expensive anyway that's it for today I hope you're having a great day I also have a free training I'm gonna link up up here if you want to watch a replay of the webinar that I did several months ago that has gotten a lot of positive reviews you can go ahead and do that that's it for today folks have a great day don't forget give us a thumbs up comment below if you've got a question you know just type trademark and let me know that you're listening that you understand what I'm saying or if you just have a comment that you want leave a comment below and ask a question that's fine we'll use that for future videos we do not answer illegal questions in YouTube comments that is a big no-no don't forget to subscribe yeah that's down here and hit the little Bell thingy and can get notified whenever we post new videos we're posting videos about once a week going forward for my DIY members I'm looking to do a Q&A call every Friday for them I don't th
Thanks for your comment Mertie Domenico, have a nice day.
- Lindsey Gouin, Staff Member
hi everybody welcome back to sunshine's open candle company today's video is a very off-brand video for me but after much thinking i thought that sharing my experience and my story about something that recently happened would be very beneficial for small businesses or anybody like you and me so i took a little informal poll on my patreon campaign last week and asked them if they wanted to hear about this story and the response was an overwhelming yes before we get started i just wanted to let you know that i'm not very good at video blogging um my strength lies in the video tutorials that i share with you every week so i apologize if this seems a little disjointed i've taken some notes and i'm going to do my best to explain my story and i also just wanted to let you know that i am no expert in the area that i'm going to be talking about i'm simply just sharing my experience with you so that you can maybe learn something from what happened so a few months ago i received what's called a trademark infringement letter from an attorney in another state i'm in the state of california and this came from out of state from an attorney's office and i was super confused when i received it so i wanted to just go over a few things before i talk about the letter i wanted to just give you the official definition of what a trademark is because i was under a different impression before i received this letter and going through this process has taught me a lot so basically a trademark can be basically anything it can be any word phrase symbol design or a combination of these things that identifies your goods or services it's how customers recognize you in the marketplace and distinguish you from your competitors so this is all according to the united states patent and trademark office which has been a very useful website for me so i'll go ahead and link that website in the description box below so you can take a look at it and basically the trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods and or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion deception or mistake about the source of the goods and or services so the trademark infringement itself had to do with my use of a two word phrase on an under eye cream night cream in layman's terms my use of the two word phrase basically can cause consumer confusion so somebody's going to buy it online they might confuse my product with this other product and accidentally buy mine and also it tarnishes my use of the two word phrase tarnishes his clients trademark so immediately after getting the letter i looked up this other company to see what the product was and then i got even more confused because i felt like there was no way i could be causing customer or consumer confusion or tarnishing the trademark with my use of the of the two word phrase however when you look at the actual trademark which is the next thing that i did there is a little piece under the trademark it encompasses a whole paragraph of of items but there was a little piece in their trademark that talks about skin care preparations and also see if i have it preparations and substances for the treatment of damaged skin and tissue so even though our products are completely different that too little line phrase in their trademark of what it encompasses i think is why they thought that there could have been some sort of customer confusion or consumer confusion even though our products are nothing alike they don't look alike they're not even named the same thing it really is just that two-word phrase that they have a trademark on so after reading that i thought well maybe i'll just go ahead and and reach out to this attorney and just let them know hey no no problem i'll change the name i'll rebrand everything i'm not married to the name no big deal i had no idea that i was infringing on anybody's trademark and then the more i read the letter the more i thought you know what i really feel like i need some help with this i don't think i can handle this on my own and they did ask me to cease and desist which i had no problem doing but there was something in the letter that just the more i read it the more i thought i probably should retain an attorney and seek some advice on this and i think it had something to do with they were basically saying that they were leaving their client an option to license to sell me a license for using the name and that is something that i just didn't want to do when i was super confused by it so i went ahead and i interviewed several attorneys in my area specifically trademark attorneys and we went ahead and we retained a trademark attorney which ended up being a very very good idea so after hiring the attorney he did a bunch of investigating for me and looked into this other company and looked into any prior trademark infringements or lawsuits or anything that they may have had already and basically came back to me and said you know i don't think that there really is any consumer confusion here however it just kind of validated he validated what i said a little bit ago regarding the skin care preparations part of their of their trademark and the damaged skin tissue part of their trademark and he basically said you know because this is in here under their trademark they do they do and can come after you for this so really it was kind of a matter of where i wanted to go with it and what i wanted to do and i had a couple options as far as this was concerned but the first thing that my attorney did was just reach out to the other attorney and he basically said hey um my my client is is willing to just let go of this and rebrand this and not use the name anymore and basically kind of indicated to them you know how much money i i've made on the product and and that sort of thing and there was a series of negotiations that happened after that so basically based on the response of the other attorney and the other client after my attorney's initial contact with them i started to really understand and know that i wasn't going to be getting out of the situation without some sort of payment so this took this took several months to to resolve but basically that initial contact was made and then the other um attorney came back it took a long time to get to this point weeks to get to this point but the other attorney came back and basically they wanted to sell me a license which i told you earlier in the video that that was not something that i wanted to do i didn't want to purchase a license for it but basically because the mark their trademark was not a contestable trademark they wanted to negotiate with me to resolve the matter and by negotiating they wanted me to either turn over all my sales my numbers of everything that i've made on the product and and or they wanted to resolve the issue with me paying them a lump sum of money um which was a lot and they also wanted me to let me read it to you they wanted me to pay this lump sum of money for the infringement of the clients incontestable mark for the past years and a five percent licensing fee on all future sales
Thanks Viola your participation is very much appreciated
- Lindsey Gouin
About the author
I've studied ergodic theory at Bay Path University in Longmeadow and I am an expert in sociology of the history of science. I usually feel frustrated. My previous job was medical insurance claims analyst I held this position for 24 years, I love talking about witchcraft and deltiology. Huge fan of Jacob Sartorius I practice sailing and collect trading cards.
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