Trademark: (Noun) A mark that is used by a manufacturer or merchant to identify the origin or ownership of goods and to distinguish them from others and the use of which is protected by law.
I found a great resource this week for businesses that helps make one of the most bureaucratic hassles less painful: Trademarkia.com, an online database of every single trademark filed in the U.S. since 1870. It is interactive and highly searchable by company or city. The website is well designed and fun to use.
It is also a database of every attorney or correspondent (person who filed and manages the trademark) in the U.S. – which is hundreds of thousands of entities. Each entry is accompanied by a picture and some amplifying data, including the name and location of the company, what kind of products or services the company provides and who registered the trademark.
Entering this data must have been a monumental task for the two-person startup out of Silicon Valley. The business started in July and has had some good reviews from influential industry press such as Tech-Crunch. (By the way, if you find this column interesting, I would highly recommend techcrunch.com.)
This site should be bookmarked and referred to any time your business is launching a new product or service. And for startups, this is a great tool for researching trademarks and seeking out an effective brand for your new business.
It’s also free. There are a number of services out there that charge handsomely for some of the services. So you are getting your money’s worth even in the 20 minutes you’ll spend diddling around on the site.
It’s also a great way to do market research. If you search by city, you can find the almost 10,000 listings here in Richmond. The trademarks are listed roughly by chronological order of when they were registered. If there are too many competing companies or products registered in this market, it would be one indicator that you should switch your plan up.
If you were doing research on a competitor, you could research what trademarks had been filed recently to get a heads-up on new products or services, or you could see what kind of things the company had tinkered with but scrapped.
So if you are wondering whether your logo is too similar to one that’s already in use, or if you are wondering whether there are any other companies in Richmond that sell motorcycle helmets for dogs , the site can help.
If you come across a logo or a company name that has an expired trademark, you can file a trademark on it right from Trademarkia for $159, plus the $50 registration fee that Virginia charges.
The site also offers a directory of all the attorneys in the country that register trademarks for companies. If you looked up Tara A. Branscom, an attorney at LeClair Ryan, you would see a list of 451 companies that Branscom had registered.
John Carroll, an intellectual law professor at University of Richmond who also serves as counsel at the law firm of Spotts Fain, P.C., took a look at Trademarkia.com with me. As an intellectual property lawyer, Carroll has worked on thousands of trademarks.
“In the past, when we wanted to help a business owner know if he or she could use a trademark, we had to use large private databases and they are often quite expensive,” Carroll said. “Those databases are still the gold standard but alternatives like [Trademarkia.com] might be a good place to start.”
Just having free access to a list of registered trademarks, like on Trademarkia.com, may not be enough, though. “Owing a registration gives you some advantages, but it’s not required,” Carroll said. “It’s really the use of a trademark in commerce that creates the legal right.” The Trademarkia.com web site does not appear to support searches for unregistered, common law marks.
So that means that all the vultures out there need to keep their grubby hands off the BizSense logo.
If you search “Marlboro,” you get what amounts to a visual history of Marlboro cigarettes and the various product launches and package designs that Philip Morris have tinkered with in the past.
One cautionary note for this site is that, while Trademarkia.com has strict privacy rules, they do not act as an attorney to protect your trademark. You can skip out on some of those hefty lawyer’s fees by using Trademarkia to register your trademark (and I would suggest it), but when it comes to the more delicate matters surrounding intellectual property law, don’t call the customer service line because they can’t help you.
David Larter reviews technology once a week for BizSense. He’s also a BizSense reporter. Please send news tips to David@richmondbizsense.com.
