Trademark is a form of intellectual-property for a person or business. To protect the mark, you are supposed to formally trademark it.
Trademarks – An Exercise in Patience
A mark is simple a distinctive name, brand, or identifier for your business. As a business becomes successful, it will almost always want to trademark its brand or logo.
Obtaining a trademark is not particularly difficult to do. The process is controlled by Patent and Trademark Office. The “PTO” is an agency falling under the control of the Department of Commerce.
Filing a trademark application with the PTO is an interesting ordeal. From a technical standpoint, it is fairly simple. You can search online to see if anyone else has already obtained the trademark you are after. If not, you can fill out an application and file it online. The PTO will assign an attorney to it. They can either approve that application, send correspondence which asks you to clarify on some aspect, or outright reject your application. While this sounds straight-forward, there is one aspect that turns the process into an annoying one – time.
The trademark office is a government agency. As such, one can expect a certain amount of lag time in getting things done. The trademark office, however, takes this to the extreme. When you first file your trademark application, you can expect to wait for up to two months before you receive anything. When you do, it will only be a postcard verifying that the office has received your application.
At this point, you need to have a lot of patience. Roughly six months will pass before you hear anything else on your application. It could be longer. The delay means nothing in relation to the merits of your application. It just takes forever. If you finally receive correspondence accepting your application, you will need to wait another month for it to be published and then become approved. If the trademark office wants clarification on your application, you will have thirty to sixty days to send it in. The process can often take more than a year to be completed.
Whether you attempt to obtain a trademark on your own or use an attorney, it is important to understand what you are getting into. Don’t worry when you don’t receive anything for 4 or 5 months. This is standard operating procedure at the PTO. Eventually you will receive a final decision from the trademark office.
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