Intellectually Legal - Business, Tech and Law Rahul Dev

Understanding Basics of Intellectual Property - Career in IP Law

Training session for students, lawyers and business professionals to understand trademark basics and brand protection strategies: 

https://patentbusinesslawyer.com/training-session-trademark-basics-brand-protection-strategy/

Lawyers advise the clients to protect their brands by way of trademarks. Brand managers work internally to build a brand that will help the company in positioning their products and services uniquely as compared to the competitors. Effectively, companies work with external lawyers and law firms to obtain protection of their creative branding assets by way of trademarks. 

As a result, lawyers and law firms act as an interface between the brand owners and the government or specifically, the trademark office to obtain trademark registrations covering unique brands. A company can own multiple brands covering their entire range of products and services. Similarly, a single brand can be protected by way of multiple trademarks to ensure complete protection. 

For example, in case of McDonald’s, you have a unique logo comprising of iconic golden arches and of course, the unique brand name written as “McDonald’s”. There’s also a unique tagline that states “I’m loving it”. From the perspective of brand owner, this requires trademark protection by filing separate trademarks for each of these elements, along with another set of trademark applications to protect these in combinations. 

Such trademark applications to protect the combinations will cover brand name plus logo, brand name plus tagline, logo plus tagline, and, brand name plus logo plus tagline all together. This type of brand protection strategy is essential to reduce the chances of unauthorised use of the brand and helps the brand owner in strong enforcement of trademark rights in case of trademark infringement.

Internationally, all the countries follow the NICE classification of goods and services. Before filing any trademark application, it is important to determine all the applicable classes. Generally, classes 1-34 cover goods, i.e. products, and classes 35-45 cover various services.