Trademark Search Options

Posted by AmandaTom on June 24th, 2013

The process of trademark registration can be a painful one, especially when you have no experience with the field and you decide to do it all by yourself. Furthermore, if you do not know how to make a proper trademark search, registering your trademark will be even harder. But you should know that there are other possibilities out there: you can choose to hire a company that provides attorneys specialized in the field of trademarks.

Besides being able to help you do a proper trademark search, the attorney will be able to tell you if your particular mark is likely to be successfully registered. Of course, this will only be possible if you choose a company that has only experienced lawyers, like Trademark Direct. If you choose to hire the expertise of an experienced professional instead of doing everything by yourself, you will see that you will actually save a lot of time and even money.

First of all, you should know how the actual trademark registration process works and not what papers to fill in. Trademark rights are always given in a ‘first come, first served’ order, meaning that the first person or organization to use a particular mark will have the upper hand. If the company provides a similar service or product such as you and you choose to use a similar mark to theirs, that particular company will have superior trademark rights over you. They can sue you for trademark infringement if they want to or they can even be the reason why your trademark registration failed.

By taking the time to do a proper trademark search, you avoid all these kinds of problems. Although only your lawyer who has experience with the problems of trade mark laws, can clear a trademark, you can choose to use a free search online to see if the name you thought about is currently being used in the market sector you wish to activate on. There are websites on this vast Internet that let you search within the official data from the US trademark office, or you can try the USPTO search system called TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System). This program and mostly all of them allow you to do a whole United States search, and will also give you advice on how to optimize your search strategy.

Furthermore, you can do an honest to God Google search or you can use any other type of search engine you like more. You simply type in your trademark and a small description of the products or the services you want to sell and see what comes up. If it turns out that somebody else is already using the trademark you had your heart set on, maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board.

You should also know that even if your searches do not come up with somebody using the exact same trademark as you, you may still be infringing upon somebody else’s trademark. That is why it is really important that an attorney also does his own search because it will give him the change to make a detailed analisys and give his oppionion on your chances of getting your trademark registration.

Having you own trademark registration can prove to be quite challenging, but if you hire professionals to help you do a proper trademark search, you will see things will seem easier.