Thursday, October 29, 2009

How Trademarks Are Categorized

By Andrea Brown

Trademark protection is granted for terms, logos and graphics that identify goods of one company as distinct from others. The main objective of trademarks is to prevent any confusion in the consumers' minds about the source of an item that they plan to buy.

A trademark must be exclusive and distinct enough for the consumers to recognize it easily even in a crowd of similar products in the market. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be determined by slotting it in one of the trademark groups - suggestive, descriptive, fanciful, and generic.

A descriptive mark is representative of the essential quality or some other characteristics of the product like its function or size. However, marks that are descriptive are not as distinctive as some other marks and thus, they are not generally capable of being trademarked. however, if the mark has attained a secondary meaning that is more well known among the consumers, it can be trademarked.

Suggestive marks are indicators to a particular product aspect or quality. However, it is usually the case that the mark and the product do not display any obvious relation and the customers might need to guess the connection between the two. For instance, the brand name known as 'Hush Puppies' points to a comfortable shoe range that makes sure that your feet do not become sore. The prime reason behind such a name is that 'barking dogs' is slang for sore feet in some places in the US.

On the other hand, fanciful marks are those that are not linked to the commodity. For instance, the use of trademark 'Apple' with a logo of a half eaten apple is not at all linked to the computers marketed under the mark. Similarly, there is no relationship between the fanciful name Exxon and the items sold under the name as it is a fruit of the creative mind of the marketing agents of the company.

Lastly generic marks are those that represent a general category of the product such as 'olive oil', and they cannot be granted any protection under trademark laws.

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