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Written by : Raymond Falt |
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the purpose of this lecture is to talk a little bit about what trademark law is for and at the outset it's worth noting that trademark is part of the federal structure of intellectual property law and what's interesting to me is that trademark law to some extent is arguably a little bit out of step with things like copyright law and patent law and copyright law and patent law exists to solve an incentive problem there's this concern that if you didn't provide a limited monopoly to inventors in the case of patents authors in the case of copyright that they may not create in the first place because it might be too easy for someone to come along and free ride off of their labor copying the intellectual content of their works and so having that available to them for free whereas they didn't have to you know work for years on the great american novel or work away at coming up with the invention that is going to work and therefore be able to undercut the price that might be commanded by the original author or inventor and so patent and copyright law are there to solve this incentive problem by providing these limited monopolies on inventions and expressive works works of authorship trademark law though by contrast is not normally justified in those terms and i think it's more worthwhile to think of trademark as a form of consumer information regulation it's there to regulate the communications that are made in the marketplace to consumers and the public at large its structure is therefore going to be different than patent copyright because there isn't a similar place for this kind of limited monopoly that patent and copyright law grant and so what is trademark law there to do what is the purpose of regulating in the space of consumer information and so you know can i have this quote from the supreme court in a case called park and flies trademark's goal is to secure to the owner of the mark the goodwill of their business and to protect the ability of consumers to distinguish among competing producers and you can hear in this quote some solicitude some attention paid to both the interests of consumers and on the interest of trademark holders and it's worth sort of unpacking that a little bit i want to start with the idea of consumer benefits what do consumers get out of trademark law at the most basic level we can think of trademark laws providing a form of consumer protection ensuring that people get what they expect and avoid things like counterfeiting avoid fraud in the marketplace and so most simply most basically if you ask for a coke do you get a coke or do you get some you know goodness knows what creation you know brewed by the person who is selling you the product in a more interesting life we might think of trademark law as minimizing or lowering what are sometimes referred to as consumer search costs and what does that mean well we might think about that when one purchases a product one might think of the person as paying two distinct costs on the one hand there's the price in the money what are you actually paying for the good that you're purchasing but the act of looking for the product in the first place trying to decide what it is exactly you know out of the range of possibilities that are before you which one do you want to buy say you're looking for a car which car am i going to buy that is not free and those costs of looking are part of your overall budget if you will we might think of the total cost that you're paying as being the money price plus your search costs and so how my trademark law work or how my trademarks work to reduce these search costs and so at the most simple level we might think of you know trademarks as kind of helping you generalize your past experience with the product to goods with the same name so i'm thirsty i want to drink something i see coke on the shelf is this coke going to be like the cokes that i've had in the past also on a simple level if i have a particular brand name that i want relying on the trademark lets me find the particular product that i want i think we can also think about this on a more interesting level and so i want to suggest that one thing that trademarks do is they act as a vehicle for communicating product information and so when you think about it between you as the buyer and the seller who has superior information about the seller's good and of course it's the seller and so the seller is all too willing to assume the cost of gathering and communicating information about their product to the consumer they're much better able to do that you know and again they're they're the low cost provider of that information so again thinking about you know you're you're out to purchase a call think about all the information that might be of interest to you in purchasing a car right the the price of the car the miles per gallon that it might get you know highway city that kind of thing the engine power what kind of pollution does it emit is it a hybrid does it have you know is an electric vehicle what kind of space is there in the trunk what kind of safety ratings etc etc etc this is the kind of thing the kind of information that the seller is able to gather on behalf of the consumer and then the trademark the brand name the name of the product in question now stands in as the receptacle of meaning for all that information right what does a toyota corolla cost what kind of miles per gallon does it get what kind of engine does it have what kind of emissions does it give off once you have a trademark set up and established for a toyota corolla it can now serve as the repository of of meaning for all these various kinds of information that the seller might want to attach to the mark and the consumer might want to know about the product in question and so what this does is it enables competition in price and quality among different sellers you may have heard in the past a reference to something known as the lemons problem why is it so hard to find a good used car one of the issues you have in the marketplace is that there's an asymmetric information problem that the sellers know if their particular car is a lemon or not and the consumer does not necessarily know what whether or not the car they're purchasing is a lemon and so imagine a hypothetical consumer has five thousand dollars available to use towards the purchase of a car now there are any number of sellers who are willing to sell that person a car for five thousand dollars but only a subset of those sellers has a car that is actually worth by you know whatever metric we may choose to use five thousand dollars and of course somebody who has a car that's worth that amount of money is probably not gonna take much less than five thousand dollars whereas lots and lots of people are willing to sell a consumer a lemon even though their cars are actually worth only four thousand three thousand two thousand dollars what have you and so what does the rational consumer do in that situation well they likely discount the amount of money that they're willing to offer to reflect the possibility that the car they're going to purchase is in fact
Thanks for your comment Chad Gil, have a nice day.
- Raymond Falt, Staff Member
hi everybody trademark attorney josh gerbin today i want to talk to you about what trademarks should you protect and it's a great question because it's not always an obvious answer so here's a quick list of the things you should try to protect with a trademark registration for your business the number one and most obvious and most important is the name of your business itself this should typically be protected even before you open your doors but if you haven't protected it now that should be your top priority in a close second as far as priority is concerned any names of particular products or services that differ from your company name should also be protected with a trademark registration you could also protect logos so think of the logo for your business name or logos for individual products or services those can be protected with a trademark registration as well the logos should typically be filed in a separate application this way here if those logos ever change the underlying name is still protected by a separate registration other things on your list can include slogans so think of nikes just do it if your company has a similar tagline or slogan that can be registered as a trademark and finally one of the most interesting things you can register as a trademark is something called trade dress so if you're selling products your product packaging could actually be protected by a trademark if you're running a service based business and someone walks into your store and there's a particular look and feel in all your stores that look and feel can be protected by a trademark registration called trade dress protection so i hope you found this video interesting as you can see there's a lot of different trademarks that any given business can register and the great thing about trademarks is they are intangible property this means once they're registered they become an asset of your company if you're ever looking to sell your company in the future having as many trademarks registered as possible will drive up the value of your company if you have any further questions about trademarks you can protect for your business please feel free to give us a call or get in touch with us by going to gerbenlaw.com backslash contact this is trademark attorney josh gerbin i'll talk to you next time
Thanks Jenine your participation is very much appreciated
- Raymond Falt
About the author
I've studied agrophysics at Husson University in Bangor and I am an expert in history of philosophy. I usually feel angry. My previous job was power-line installer and mechanic I held this position for 13 years, I love talking about baseball and zebra hunting. Huge fan of Billy Ray Cyrus I practice balance beam and collect first day covers.
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