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Thanks for your comment Lincoln Roseman, have a nice day.
- Tiana Hegre, Staff Member
trademark classes now we should talk a little bit about the classes of goods and services that you can file a trademark in when you file a trademark application one of the first things we do when working with clients on their trademark application is understanding what goods or services they are offering the reason this is important is because the rights you receive in a trademark are limited to the specific goods or services you offer in other words the list of the goods and services is an important aspect of the trademark application as the scope of the applicant's rights in the trademark is defined and limited by the scope of the classes that you list in your application this list is also known as the specification what this means to you in practical terms is that when you're filing your trademark application we have to select different categories called classes of goods and services for the trademark essentially every good and services known to mankind has been divided into forty five different classes by the International classification system established by the nice agreement concerning the International classification of goods and services for the purposes of registration of marks an international treaty consummated on the 15th of June 1957 in Nice France the nice agreement is open to states who are parties to the Paris Convention for the protection of industrial property in total the nice classification system contains around 10,000 indications of goods and 1,000 indications of services the advantage of having classes is that you can have very similar even identical trademarks in different industries which do not result in the end-user being confused for example you have Dove chocolate and Dove soap you've got Delta Airlines and Delta faucets and there's a lot of other Delta's out there as well the reason these trademarks can coexist is because there are vastly different markets if I'm in the market to buy a body soap I'm not going to confuse that with the name of a chocolate maker now there are always exceptions every rule but in general the rule is that if a trademark is in a different line of business or a different channel trait even if it's identical to a pre-existing trademark they can co-exist an obvious exception would be trademarks that are defined for the Paris Convention to have become well-known like Nike or coca-cola you can't go make coca-cola soap without confusing and users as everybody knows coca-cola it's just not gonna happen the classes are number 1 through 45 classes 1 to 34 related Goods and classes 35 to 45 relate to services now let's say you're selling clothing sunglasses in purses those actually fall into three different categories clothing is class 25 purses would be class 18 and sunglasses in class 9 the significance to you is that the trademark offices filing fees are computed based on how many classes and you are filing now some countries allow you a single fee for up to three classes others charge by class and the final filing costs will be multiplied by as many classes as you're trying to register so if filing one trade back in one class costs two hundred and forty dollars now you will be paying seven hundred and twenty dollars to file a trademark application in three separate classes now this is where small business owners have to be very careful about their strategy for registering a trademark and how many classes they actually want to include when filing a trademark as the cost can raise very quickly so at the end of the day we're trying to figure out what goods or services are we offering what are the applicable classes and then what strategy do we want to take do we have the budget to apply for classes that are only tangential and not really critical to our business or do we need to register in less classes to keep the cost within budget another important aspect of using classes is the ability to exclude classes when there is a conflict with another similar trademark when an examiner rejects your trademark because it is descriptive of its goods for services for example when you need to overcome an Chinn for an opposition based on the likelihood of confusion you can decide to exclude certain classes of goods and services that are similar to that of the similar trademark in order to overcome that objection an applicant may also restrict his specification nor to overcome an objection made under absolute grounds where the trademark is found to be descriptive by using restrictions and positive or negative terms such as alcoholic beverages consisting of vodka rum or alcoholic beverages none of which being whiskey or gin you may be able to overcome a refusal for an opposition citing an earlier trademark that already covers whiskey and gin beverages please feel free to watch more of our videos to get valuable insights but the mechanics of applying for trademark registrations defending your marks opposing other conflicting Mart's dealing with office actions and many other intellectual property issues my name is jonathan morton and i have a licensed US attorney and a member of the trade markers network don't forget to subscribe
Thanks dodatkowy9 your participation is very much appreciated
- Tiana Hegre
About the author
I've studied industrial engineering at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in Bloomsburg and I am an expert in data storage. I usually feel calm. My previous job was dentist (md) I held this position for 21 years, I love talking about car fixing & building and diorama making. Huge fan of Whitney Houston I practice windsurfing and collect books.
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