As the authoritative force in Employment and Labor Law today, we have, here at Miletti Law®, committed to creating enlightening and educative content, which aims to keep you, our unusually motivated® readers, #InTheKnow about issues that affect you and/or your businesses. Usually, the content features as videos that are posted on our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvUryqkkMAJLwrLu2BBt6w and blogs that are published on our website WWW.MILETTILAW.COM.

We’ve mentioned in our past blogs and videos that we’re fervently interested in and thrilled by intellectual property law, under which things like brands are covered. True to this, we prepared for you, at the start of the month of August, a video titled “3 Ways You Can Protect Your Brand With Minimal Effort,” and a blog with detailed information on the same. Accordingly, in order to ensure that you are continually updated and informed, we’re committed to moving forward this discussion and powering through other matters related to this subject. For this reason, we’ve prepared for you another video titled “4 Great Sources To Determine If Your Brand is Truly Original,” which is accessible through the link provided at the end of this blog.

While ill-minded people will most likely infringe on your intellectual property, there’s also a likelihood that yours is a copycat or an imitation of something you saw or an idea you got from somewhere. Remember, creating a brand is the practice of taking an intangible thought, turning it into something tangible, and giving it life! You could have obtained that thought from somewhere else and, thus, it’s critical to be aware of how you can determine whether your brand is truly original.

In this case, we shall assume that you are in the process of creating a brand and, henceforth want to make sure that it’s original. Usually, problems are bound to arise when you want to file and register, especially when you’ve used it for some time. Before we delve into the 4 group sources, we’d like to mention something beforehand regarding our opinion towards the function of the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office).

If America is truly the land of many opportunities, people should be free to enjoy ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness.  At the same time, while we want you to be inventive and creative, we also want you to be able to reap the benefits of your creativity. To do so, we permit you to own your brand, own your concept, and prohibit others from making versions that may come off as confusing, thus diluting your unique brand. However, at the same time, by prohibiting others from creating other brands that may come off as confusing (which is subjective in of itself) we are in fact stifling creativity.  So there is this constant tug of war between encouraging others to use their creative efforts to advance art, culture, creativity in business, and at the same time, blocking others from making variations that may come off as confusing, dilute your profitability, and infringe on your brand.

This is in fact a very cynical way to look at the USPTO—as merely a mechanism designed to reject your claims to exclusivity in a brand—because all things considered, a truly unique brand would never have overlap. If the USPTO is concerned with ensuring your brand doesn’t see the light of day, how can you defeat this ahead of time?

How do you circumvent these issues? From a legal perspective, you ought to do due diligence at the onset such as using the services of an attorney or carrying out your own research to investigate whether your brand is similar to some other brands out there. Due diligence will prove a critical step before you file for your brand because it will significantly reduce the chances that you’ll be screwed over by someone.

That being said, we hope to provide you with a hands-on guide on those group sources you can use to ascertain that what you call your brand is actually yours and not a copycat or imitation of some other brand. Still, the brand you believe to be originally yours today could belong to someone or some other entity in a month’s time. All these possibilities underscore the need for due diligence. At this point, we’ve got your back with the 4 great sources that you can use to ascertain that what you call your brand is actually yours and, thus, you don’t have to go through sleepless nights wondering how to go about.

USPTO’S Trademark Search & Index

Irrespective of our opinion about them, the USPTO website is the single most resourceful and comprehensive tool. Ideally, the site allows you to customize your search, such that you can use a part of or a whole word or even carry out an image search. You could also conduct a ‘live or dead’ search for a trademark. However, when you search for a trademark and it turns out to be either dead or alive, then you should know that it’s still not an original brand.

Google’s General Search

Yes, you got that right!! Make Google a close friend when it comes to this. Google is a very rich fishing ground when you want information regarding existing brands, both alive and dead. You just need to key in the name of your brand or a few words on the same and Google will provide you with one billion hits in a half of a second. However, Google is most suitable when you are using keywords to conduct your searches.

TinEye & Yandex

So, how about when you want to search for images or logos? It turns out that TinEye and Yandex are resourceful tools when you are using an image or a logo to conduct your search. Usually, these two search engines will provide you with results if anything similar matches your logo or image. However, you need to be cautious when uploading anything new because, it’s highly likely that there are hundreds of bots that are more than happy to help internet fraudsters and trolls steal your logo.

Instagram

Finally, Instagram is also a good starting point, especially because of the features, qualities, and characteristics of the platform itself. For starters, Instagram is a world leading social media platform where people and entities post typically anything, especially in the form of images (pictures, drawings, and photographs) and videos. Further, there’s less risk involved with Instagram because, while it’s much of a brand on its own, it’s managed and operated efficiently and in real-time. They are concerned with user protection and that is why they address concerns promptly, which reduces risk significantly.

Stay tuned for the next part of this series and always be #UnusuallyMotivated. In the interim, if there are any questions or comments, please let us know at the Contact Us page!