Full Trademark Search for Businesses-What It Is?

What is full trademark search for businesses?

A full trademark search for businesses is an act of doing a comprehensive search of all the avenues that can potentially have an impact on an intended mark. Unlike knock-out trademark search wherein we care only about some specific aspects, here, we consider all the possible aspects that can affect our intended mark in future.

Why do full trademark search?

While you are going to trademark your product or service it is important to ensure right at the beginning that you are investing your resources in right direction and not just reinventing the wheel. This will be possible only when you do a thorough, comprehensive and full trademark search for your intended mark.

How to do a full trademark search?

Doing exact match search- Irrespective of the fact whether you do a knock out trademark search or a full trademark search doing exact match search is necessary. This is the first and initial step, trademark search professionals undertake to assess the validity of an intended mark. With this strategy, they usually put the exact keyword provided by their client(s) in the search database and look for relevant information.

Doing deceptively similar marks Search- A full trademark search for businesses can’t be accomplished if deceptively similar marks are not searched. Because these days businesses are likely to choose marks that are deceptive in appearance, and sounding. For example, if you are intending to trademark the term “STYLEWORKS” we need to ensure that marks like STYLEWORKX, STYLEWRKS are not registered.

Doing trademark search with vowel replacement- In fact vowel replacement search is a mechanism of finding deceptively similar marks. This is done by putting vowel replacement operator in the specified place and letting the trademark search database give the desired results.

Doing any character replacement search- “Any character replacement search” is another important search campaign that should be employed while doing a full trademark search. With this search, we can find even those similar terms which are created by altering a character.

Trademark search with operators- Operator search is another important trademark search strategy that should be employed when intending for an effective trademark search. With this, we search two different terms using various operators like AND, OR, NOT, XOR, SAME, WITH, NEAR and ADJ.

Trademark search with phonetic search- Phonetic search is another important search strategy that is employed by trademark search experts while doing a full trademark search. Phonetic equivalents are words that sound-alike creating the possibility of confusion between the two words (for example ‘CAT’ and ‘KAT’).

Phonetic equivalents are important because they indicate how an existing mark may be perceived by a consumer as, too similar to your proposed mark. If phonetically equivalent marks exist in the same industry there is a strong possibility of consumer confusion and the proposed mark may be rejected.

Trademark search with common law search- A comprehensive and full trademark search will be incomplete without doing a common law search. In a jurisdiction like the United States, trademark is given on first-use basis wherein trademark rights are conferred even if someone has simply used it. So to avail the benefits of trademarks, federal registration is not mandatory. This is why we need to do common law searches wherein various business directories, financial documents, domain name registries, white papers and news outlets are searched to assess if the mark already exists.

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