Trademark

What Exactly is a Trademark for? ™

You always see those ™ trademarks all over everything from movie posters to toys to food packaging. If you ask most people, they’ll be able to tell you that the Trade Mark has “Something to do with copyright… doesn’t it?”

Licensing, copyright, trademark, intellectual property, it gets confusing trying to sort them all out sometimes. So let’s just focus on Trademark for a minute, and try to put it in simple terms without too much in the way of legal terminology that reads like a foreign language.

A trademark is defined as a distinctive sign, or an indicator of some sort, put to use by either an individual, a company, or a legal entity, so as to mark the source of the products that bear the trademark.

The ™ is not the trademark. The ™ symbol is only used to indicate that what you are reading is, in fact, a legal, registered trademark. For example, when you look at a sign that reads Coca-Cola™, it’s actually the word Coca-Cola that is the registered trademark, not the ™ slapped onto the end. The ™ is only there to indicate that the trademark is registered, so as to dissuade anyone from trying to appropriate the trademark for their own use without permission or license from the trademark owner.

Trademarks are not registered solely to names, either, but also to logos, symbols, a specific word when written in a specific font, iconic imagery, etcetera. Basically, anything that can be used as a “mark” to place on all products from a common source. Sort of like Batman or Superman wearing their own trademarks on their shirts. The trademark is sort of a signature for either an individual or a larger legal entity.

A registered trademark differs from copyright ownership in that the trademark is just the symbol applied to something. A company needs to copyright individual products, and cannot simply rely on slapping their ™ on it and consider it copyright protected.

So, a copyright protects the intellectual property of an individual or a company, such as films, a soda pop recipe, a t-shirt design, etcetera, while registering a trademark protects a logo, a company name, or a signature tag of some sort.

In the United States, when a trademark is applied to a service, rather than a product, it is called a Service Mark.

The owner of a registered trademark or service mark is free to pursue legal action regarding matters of trademark infringement, and may also take steps to prevent a trademark from being used without authorization. However, registration is not actually required. If possible, it is preferable, but not absolutely necessary. A common law trademark may file suit, but without registration, the trademark may only be considered valid in the region where the trademark has been used by its originator.

An amusing incident wherein this was taken advantage of: In the 1980’s, when the Christopher Reeve’s Superman movies were released, the essence of the Superman character sort of boiled down to the big red “S” trademark on his chest, and the symbol had only been a common law trademark at the time. This left filmmakers in India, Turkey, Italy, and Spain to make their own Superman movies without fear of legal repercussions by changing details about the actual character as such that the big red “S” was really the only similarity left. Because these movies were neither condoned nor informed by the trademark holders, the results could be pretty far out, casting well known heroes as homicidal villains and so on.

So in other words, registering your trademark is only necessary if you hope to own the trademark in other countries and so on. If you’re not really worried about that, you only need to do a little research to make sure your trademark isn’t already taken, and then put a ™ next to that trademark wherever it appears.

For clarification, a trademark only covers itself. A trademark does not extend into copyright laws. Placing a trademark on a product of your creation does not make that product your legal intellectual property. Inventions need to be patented, and creative concepts need to be copyrighted. The trademark only covers your distinctive logo, title, stamp, or other signature. In some cases, as we mentioned, with Superman, the trademark can be such a major part of a character or idea that it’s practically all you need to worry about (nobody’s going to make a Superman story without the big red S, for example), but in general, having a trademark is only good for protecting a brand name, and not other intellectual property.