Each new day, we, Miletti Law, endeavor to educate and enlighten our unusually motivated® readers about how to handle issues that affect them and their businesses.

As the authoritative force in Employment and Labor Law, we feel obligated to provide you with crucial insights that will help you to stay at the top of the game, particularly as it concerns your business. This is why we’ve prepared for you a video titled “3 Ways You Can Protect Your Brand With Minimal Effort!” Yes, do you have a brand? Are you thinking of creating one? If you do, then worry not because we’ve got your back concerning how to protect your brand.

By way of backdrop, branding is one area of business marketing that we, Miletti Law, are very passionate about. Thinking about some of the leading global brands, whether in the automobile industry, computing, or e-commerce, the nuanced art of actively taking an abstract concept, thing, or idea and giving it life, a personality, or a secondary meaning is simply fascinating. In itself, branding is sensational because it fuels human creativity.

At Miletti Law, we’ve come to adopt what we call “Legal Branding;” a perfect combination of our background in law and passion for branding.

In a nutshell, a successful brand is an amalgam of two core canons – (1) creating and developing the brand, and (2) giving the brand long-term sustainability and protection. The process of brand creation and development entails a myriad of critical tasks that include recruiting a team on board, making your logo, design the pictures and images, give the brand a story, life, and meaning and then market it. This underscores the need to protect the brand. However, doing so is not a ride in the park.

At Miletti Law, we’ve recognized the need for a brand to be protected in a sustainable and affordable way, with minimal effort and without spending a fortune suing people or entities that illegally use and imitate your brand, or worse, steal it.

At this juncture, we offer you, from a legal perspective, 3 critical strategies/tools you can utilize to protect your brand. Before we delve into each strategy/tool, let’s create a scenario. You are an entrepreneur who wants to specialize in the manufacture of automobile tires. The first thing you do is to come up with a catchy and creative brand name for your tires. You’ve done that, good! Then you need to follow these strategies to ensure your brand is protected.

File for Your Brand’s Trademark

First things first! A trademark is legally established or registered. This means that you must file for a trademark. Here, in the U.S., you simply apply for a trademark on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site. So long as you are a domestic citizen or business, a lawyer is not even mandatory, unless you need one for personal reasons (a U.S. based attorney is required if you are a foreign entity). In the trademark, you include the brand name of your tires, the class, and any other information pertinent with your tires. Registering for a trademark is a fundamental step in protecting your brand because you get automatic protection under the statute. With such protection, you have the legal power to sue those who infringe or use the brand without your approval or authorization for statutory damages and keep them at bay.

Register for your Brand’s Copyright

Yes, you got it right! Copyright and trademark are different when it comes to a brand. While a trademark involves the abstract name/concept you’ve given to your tires, a copyright entails the creative artistic/musical concepts, writings, or designs attached to the product. In this case, your team could come up with an artistic image, writing, or picture and a theme song that plays whenever you advertise your tires. That’s your copyright; file for its protection.

File for Automatic Protection at the Border

In the U.S., automatic protection at the border is usually provided for by the Customs and Border Patrol agency. However, you must be armed with your trademark in order to obtain automatic protection for your tires at the border. Most likely, your trademark will be infringed on outside the U.S. Essentially, automatic protection ensures the automatic stopping and seizing of goods bearing your trademark from overseas. This is a core strategy in protecting your brand because no such products will be allowed to enter the United States.

Stay tuned for more videos, training and guidance!! In the interim, if there are any questions or comments, please let us know at the Contact Us page!