Importance of trademarks for your business

• Helps customers find and recognize your brand: Staying in a crowded market without a name or identity is simply dangerous for the longevity of a new company’s brand. Trademarks distinguish you from other brands, making it easier for customers to find you;  Because many brands offer the same services and products a powerful trademark helps your customers feel comfortable that they are dealing with you and not your competitor.

• Trademarks act as a communication tool: Trademarks are a testament to the quality of your company’s brand, even in your absence. A trademark precedes you and the mere presence of a powerful name like ROLEX, for example, shows people from all over the world what the brand stands for.  

• Trademarks are assets: Trademarks are not just abstract conceptualizations but are truly financial assets. The value of trademarks increases with time, and as your business grows, the name grows as well. Eventually, bigger corporations will want to identify their own products with your powerful brand and may very well be willing to either license or buy your trademark/s outright.

• Trademarks make using social media platforms more effective: For a brand that has an online presence on different social media platforms, your trademark is what helps customers find and connect with you. The more your brand is searched for, the higher your rankings become, and ultimately, the more traffic your page will get. 

1. Trademarks do not expire: So long as you are still using the trademark in commerce, you will maintain your rights to the trademark. However, if you stop using your trademark, you will cause it to be abandoned.

• Attracts and improves human resources: Who wouldn’t want to work with a popular brand? With a well-known trademark, hiring workers is easier because everyone wants to be a part of something big. Employees will have a greater sense of pride and awareness when working for a prodigious company.

Protecting your trademark

To protect your trademark, there are certain strategic and legal considerations that must be taken into account both before the trademark is applied for and again after it has obtained a registration from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Below is an overview of different steps one must take to acquire a trademark and protect it:

• Please do your research: The first step to protecting your trademark is conducting preliminary research in the USPTO register to determine the availability of the trademark. If proper research is done before submitting a trademark application, the risk of having the trademark rejected is greatly reduced. 

• Apply for a trademark: After your research, once you are sure that the chosen name, logo, or phrase is unique to only your brand, you may proceed with filing the trademark application. During this process, you will be required to provide information about your brand, the type of service and product offered, an image of your desired trademark (if you are applying for a Logo), and proof that you are using the trademark in commerce. All of this information must be accurate for the application to proceed.

• Respond to office actions: after submitting your application, be ready at all times to respond to any preliminary rejections of your trademark, or what are legally referred to as, Office Actions. Ensure that you do not miss the deadline because your application will be abandoned if you fail to respond to the Office Action in time (within 6 months of receiving it). 

• Monitor your trademark: Before trademarks are registered, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office publishes them to the “Official Gazette) for the public to see and potentially oppose the trademark’s registration if it is an infringement on an existing trademark. So, it is critical for a trademark holder (you!) to protect your own trademark by monitoring the Official Gazette and opposing other trademarks that are too similar to yours. 

Apart from doing preliminary research prior to filing your trademark application and monitoring pending trademarks for infringement of your trademark, there are other actions and milestones that must be met for you to maintain your proprietary rights to your trademark, including:

• Renewing your trademark: make sure you renew your trademark registration according to the appropriate dates (typically within 5 and 10 years of the trademark’s registration). If you miss these deadlines, you run the risk of Abandoning your trademark.

• Continue to Use Your Trademark: Trademarks only maintain their protectability for as long as they are actually used in commerce. If you stop selling your products or services under the banner of your trademark/s, you will lose the rights to your trademark/s.

• Hire a Trademark Monitoring service: It can be both challenging and at times overwhelming to continuously keep track of who may or may not be illicitly using a trademark that is too similar to yours.  A watch service will alert you on any unauthorized use of your mark and notify you of new trademark filings and applications

• Have a policy for how cases of misuse or copying will be handled: Knowing what to do before a problem arises will make everything easier. If your trademark is subject to infringement, you must confront the infringer head-on and enforce your trademark rights. Therefore, set a standard rule for how such cases will be handled before they arise. 

Building a brand is not easy, and developing a popular trademark will not happen overnight. Hence, the a tendency for popular trademarks to be copied by other smaller brands. However, your brand doesn’t have to be the biggest before you start creating a trademark protection strategy. Of course, everyone hopes to grow a large and well-known brand; the important thing is that you just get started.

With a solid and concrete trademark protection strategy, you will not just protect your trademark, but you will also have the necessary tools and plans in place for future infringements.  Setting the stage now and putting everything in place before the emergence of an issue will save you a great deal of future financial pain and frustration.

Conclusion

In sum, protecting your trademark starts with the planning and registration process. If your trademark protection strategy is solid, which is to say, your trademark is unique to your business and the products/services you sell, the registration process will go smoothly and you will hopefully avoid any office actions against the mark.

Have experience with protecting or enforcing your company’s trademark? Please feel free to share your experiences and opinions in the comment box.

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The post Why do you need to Create a Strategy For Protecting Your Trademarks? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Day trading strategies are effective in helping traders exploit increased market volatility, but at the same time, having such a short-term approach could result in lower trading accuracy. No matter the strategy, a lot of false signals will be generated on a day-to-day basis, and finding methods to filter them is one of the greatest challenges. Luckily, though, there are a lot of effective tools for day trading and we will talk about the three most important categories.

#1 Tools for market sentiment analysis

Understanding the market sentiment and how it fluctuates during the day represents one of the key tasks day traders must handle. In terms of tools that can help achieve that, possibilities are diverse. More often than not, traders will use technical indicators like MACD or RSI, to figure out the dominant market direction and trade with it.

At the same time, professionals use naked charts and price action principles to understand what happens behind the charts. By doing that, they can understand how institutional investors are placing trades. Big candles or consecutive candles with a directional bias are indicative of an impulsive move. Mixed price action developments communicate that the order flow is balanced and a corrective move is in play.

A combination of both technical indicators and price action could serve as a more efficient method of understanding market sentiment. It’s up to each trader to find a methodology that makes sense, proves effective in different market conditions, and fits their daily schedule. Additionally, tools for market sentiment analysis can also be useful for finding reliable brokers for your day trading processes. For example, if you want to find brokers for Metatrader 5, you can use a tool like Google Trends to see if there is any positive or negative sentiment around the broker. If you see a lot of positive sentiment, it may be worth considering that broker.

#2 Risk management tools

Risk management is part of learning about day trading regimes and traders must ensure that rules are being respected at any point in time. Aside from the traditional stop loss, take profit, risk per trade, and risk of ruin, additional tools are welcomed. easyMarkets, a regulated broker, is an example of a company providing traders a series of extra tools aimed at helping control risk. A prime example is deal Cancellation, a unique proprietary tool that, when activated before a trade, allows you to undo losing trades within 1, 3, or 6 hours in exchange for a small fee.

Without a proper risk management strategy in play, day trading could turn out to be a simple gamble, given the high market uncertainty. Especially now in 2020, stricter risk parameters should be set, to limit the potential downside in each trading opportunity. You can also take a forex trading course which can help you to manage things easily and quickly.

#3 Tools for anticipating oversold/overbought conditions

The market can’t move on a straight line, not even on an intraday basis, and because of that, traders need tools that spot oversold or overbought conditions. Oscillators like Stochastic or the Relative Strength Index (RSI) are extremely popular, but as with other indicators, there are certain limitations. At the same time, since we talk about trading in the short term, oscillators can remain oversold or overbought for an extended period.

As a result, understanding the market sentiment and trading in the dominant market direction is key to not getting trapped in a counter-trend trade. The price actions could be indicative of the market condition (oversold/overbought), as well, and could serve as an additional tool to understand the broader context.

To be an effective day trader, one should be able to create a proper mix of different tools that combine sentiment analysis, risk management, and indicators to spot potential turning points in the market. Failing to do that will result in inconsistency, large drawdowns, and a lower probability of generating returns in the long run.

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Unfortunately, copyright law has a reputation for appearing opaque and incomprehensible to outsiders.

Fortunately, this guide will help you understand the basics of copyright and trademark law.

Trademark 101

Let’s start at the very beginning – what is a trademark?

As defined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a trademark is a symbol, word, phrase, or design that serves to identify and distinguish the goods and services of one party from another. A “service mark” is something that is the actual mark that serves as a stand-in for the company – think the Golden “M” for McDonald’s or the “swoosh checkmark shape” for Nike. That said, “trademark” is often used to collectively refer to the company, goods, services, and marks.

What about copyright?

Where a trademark typically refers to a company, copyright typically refers to media and art. Books, films, plays, video games, songs – when produced by professional commercial artists, can all be covered by copyright.

The Requirements for Registering a Trademark in the United States

If you have read all of that and think you’re ready to file a trademark, you may want to hold that thought – there’s a lot more to it than that.

For one thing, if you are “a foreign-domiciled applicant,” you need to make sure you go through the application process in the United States. While the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and other countries and political blocs are signatories to The Paris Convention, copyrights and trademarks that exist in one country do not immediately transfer over to the US system. Moreover, a UK or EU solicitor may not be able to file on your behalf, as you will need to have a US-licensed attorney represent your trademark filing when sending in your application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

That requirement does not extend to US citizens, though it is highly advisable to hire someone who is a specialist in US trademark law.

For both the United States and foreign-domiciled applicants, neither foreign attorneys nor non-attorneys are allowed to provide legal advice pertaining to the application process. In addition, they may not help you fill out the form, sign the documents for you, or otherwise act on your behalf. Doing any of this could result in your application being delayed, jeopardized, or ruled invalid.

There are many additional legal guidelines and requirements you’ll have to meet before you can apply for a trademark, including:

•  Is the trademark federally registerable? You’ll need to check the rules for what can and cannot be trademarked. While this is somewhat subjective, as a general rule, the more unique and distinctive a mark, design, or slogan is, the better your chances of it being ruled as federally registerable as a trademark. For example, “We provide great service” is obviously far too generalized to be trademarked – that’s a common phrase many businesses and people use. On the other hand, the McDonalds symbol is distinctly and unmistakably for McDonald’s and only McDonalds and is thus federally registered and protected as a trademark.
•  Identifiable Goods or Services? What exactly does your service or company “offer”? What does your product “do”? Questions such as these are necessary for making sure that commercial trademarks are only given to active companies offering real, legal goods and services. The more distinctly you can answer these questions, the better your chances.
• Proper Filing? You must make sure that you have gone through the application process step by step, and have filed the right type of paperwork for the right type of trademark, patent, or copyright. There are differences between those last three, as explained below, so make sure you are applying for the specific type of Intellectual Property protection you need.

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Making Your Mark

If you look at antique books or pieces of porcelain, you’ll often find they have identifying markings that show where they were manufactured and by which company. That practice obviously continues today with trademarking. With the advent of different forms of media, the concept of a defining “mark” has been expanded to include other forms of product and service identification.

To be trademarked, your product will need to make use of at least one of these three types of identifying marks:

● Standard Character Format: This pertains to the use of standard letters, numbers, words, or combinations. For example, eBay, AT&T, and 21^st Century Fox are all examples of trademarked company names protected by trademark law.

● Special Character Format: This pertains to special unique designs or stylized elements. The spherical logo for AT&T, for example, as well as the stylized font in the spelling of “eBay”, fits into this category.

● Sound Mark: This pertains to copyrighted musical or tonal pieces. The iconic drum and fanfare at the beginning of a 21^st Century Fox film is a perfect example.

Difference Between Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents?

One major difference between trademarks and copyrights (and patents) is that the latter can expire while the former does not. Something that is trademarked can remain that way forever, as long as the mark remains in use in a commercial way that serves to distinguish your goods and services from another. Trademark registration can also last forever, as long as you continue to file the required documents and pay fees at the required intervals.

Copyright, on the other hand, can expire, though it now applies for longer than ever before. For works created by individual creators, copyright protection in the United States extends for the life of the creator plus 70 years. For works created under a pseudonym, anonymously, or for hire (such as part of a corporation like Disney) copyright extends until 95 years after the date of publication or 120 years after the date of creation, whichever is shorter.

Finally, patents pertain to inventions. These can include new or improved machines, manufactured items, chemical compositions, and manufacturing processes. The protections for patents are far more limited, with a design patent only lasting 15 years from issuance (14 if filed before May 13, 2015) or 20 years in the case of utility and plant patents.

Copyright Infringement Suits

Finally, what about copyright infringement?

This is the unauthorized use of any of the trademarked elements listed above. To constitute copyright infringement, the similarity has to be such that a consumer would be confused, deceived, or given to mistake one product for the other.

Suits for trademark and copyright infringement often wind up in federal court. The burden of proof is on the copyright holder making the claim that the offending product or service has infringed upon their copyright. If they are successful in making this claim, penalties for the guilty party can range from injunctions and cease and desist orders to the destruction of products bearing the infringed upon mark to monetary compensation.

Just like trademarks themselves, every copyright and trademark infringement case is different, you’ll want to consult with a lawyer about the particulars of your case.

With this introductory guide, you should be better equipped to navigate the world of trademark and copyright law.

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The post The Blogger’s Guide to Copyright and Trademark Law appeared first on Tricky Enough.