Trademark search in the United States is something that a professional trademark search company come across frequently and thus, it is better to understand its delicacies and subtleties right at the beginning before doing a comprehensive trademark search.
No matter whether you are a start-up or a well-established company, protecting your brand value is important at every stage of life. Choosing the right name for your business and brand can mean the difference between success and failure. Regardless of the size and nature of the company it is always important for companies to ensure that the name you want is available and protected for exclusive use in connection with your goods or services. But how exactly does one know if the name they want is already taken or available for use and registration? The best way to start is by conducting a trademark search.
Trademark Search in United States: What to Keep in Mind
States: While doing trademark search in US, it is important to refer trademark databases of all the states in the country. Some companies may have filed for protection in a single state or some may have protected their brand in the entire country. Considering respective states while doing trademark search can make your search more accurate, correct and worthy.
Goods or Services: Before doing a trademark search it’s important to determine if the intended search is for goods or services. Since goods and services have different class it will help searcher narrow their search and find the relevant data with high degree of accuracy.
Madrid Database: While we can do trademark search individually of each country it will be a time-consuming affair and hence the best way to do a trademark search is to search a centralized, single and unified database that records trade related data of all the member countries and this is where comes the importance of Madrid Database provided by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). No matter whether you are looking for trade-name, trade-mark or any other trademark related data, referring this database can help you do a comprehensive trademark search.
NICE Classification: While doing a comprehensive trademark search it is important to get the exact classification code (Class) of the product or service. Searching trademarks and trade names with class can help you narrow the search and reduce the amount of time taken in doing a search and hence it is important to follow a globally accepted classification system that can help searcher do their work in almost no time. The Nice Classification, established by the Nice Agreement (1957), is a system of classifying goods and services for the purpose of registering trademarks. It is updated every five years and its latest 10th version of the system groups products into 45 classes (classes 1-34 include goods and classes 35-45 embrace services).
In a nutshell, we can say that doing trademark research is not a cake walk and it requires huge investment of time, energy and resources to get the desired result, still by considering above mentioned facts and with a customized trademark search we can reduce cut-short resources we put into it.
