Henry Law Firm is Your Trademark Authority™
Enforcing your rights
Are you being infringed?
Infringement can take on many faces. Perhaps your branding is being directly copied by a competitor. Other times, infringement takes the shape of branding that is not a direct copy, but is so similar to your protected branding that it is causing your customers to be confused or misled.
Why should you care?
Trademark law requires you to “police” your trademark. While you don’t have to go to the police academy, you are under an obligation to make sure no one is diluting the connection between the goods or services that carry your mark – or an infringing mark that is confusingly similar to your mark – and you as the origin of those goods or services. Failure to enforce your mark can lead to losing it or it becoming generic and unenforceable.
You should consult an attorney if you believe your rights are being infringed upon by a competitor.
Counterfeit products
The law prohibits direct copying—counterfeiting—of your protected products. If someone is directly copying your product, Henry Law can assist you in understanding your rights not only on a local level, but also by compelling Customs to interdict the importation of counterfeited products when appropriate.
These remedies typically require a federal trademark registration, which is another reason it is important to secure a federal trademark registration early.
Amazon Brand Registry
The popularity of e-commerce websites (Amazon, Etsy, E-Bay, etc.) has created problems for trademark owners including trademark infringement and counterfeiting.
The Amazon Brand Registry is designed to combat some of the infringement problems, and Amazon encourages all Amazon sellers to enroll. This free program provides global word and image searches to find potential infringers and allows trademark owners the ability to quickly review and remove potential infringers from the Amazon Marketplace.
Amazon now requires sellers to have a federal trademark registration for a standard word mark or a combination of a design and wordmark (design-only marks are not currently eligible for the Amazon Brand Registry). The registration must also be on the Principal Register, which is only available for inherently distinctive marks and those marks which have become distinctive through the acquisition of a secondary meaning.