• Posts by William Borchard
    Senior Counsel

    Bill has handled domestic and international trademark and copyright matters at the highest level for over 60 years.  He has counseled and represented clients on domestic and international trademark matters concerning clearance ...

Posted in Trademarks

If you are thinking of registering a variation of a famous trademark for use as your own mark, think again.

In selecting a word to use as a trademark, don’t assume you know what it will mean to all consumers.

Filled shot glass in front of agave plant

Certification marks differ from trademarks and service marks, but they are protected against uses of identical or confusingly similar terms just like trademarks and service marks.

A U.S. trademark application may be found to be void from the beginning if it is filed in the wrong name.

Many of us are looking for humor to divert our attention from Coronavirus cabin fever.

We are reminded of two cases in which animals—respectively a monkey and a cat—were held not to have ownership rights in intellectual property.  It is curious that these rights were seriously asserted in the first place, and that they were dealt with in a semi-serious manner in the second place.

A group of marks having a recognizable characteristic in common with each other may enjoy greater protection than each individual mark, depending on how the marks are promoted and when the rights are asserted.

Microscopic view of coronavirus cells

What can you do to protect your goodwill if you unknowingly select an unfortunate brand name, or through no fault of your own, your brand name threatens to be tainted by an extraneous circumstance—like the coronavirus outbreak in 2020?

Whether a licensee is precluded (legally called an “estoppel”) from challenging the validity or enforceability of the intellectual property rights licensed to it will depend on whether those rights are patents, trademarks, trade secrets or copyrights, and in some cases whether the license agreement has a no-contest provision.

Inaccurate information in a copyright application, though sometimes correctable, may end up costing a pretty penny.

A logo can be covered by both copyright and trademark rights.  If you commission an independent contractor to design a logo for your use, ownership of those rights may vary because there are differences between the copyright law and the trademark law in the United States.

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