Trademark is an intellectual property right that safeguards certain images, texts etc of a company from being misused by others. The basic objective of trademarks is to ensure that people can purchase the correct products without being influenced by the spurious or counterfeited ones.
A trademark must be unique and distinct enough for the customers to identify it easily even amongst a crowd of similar products in the market. This distinctiveness of trademarks is recognized by slotting them into four basic categories – suggestive, descriptive, generic, and arbitrary or fanciful.
A descriptive mark is one that describes a product with respect to its quality or features like smell, functionality, form etc. Unlike other marks that are unique to a particular commodity, a descriptive mark is not unique and is not capable of being trademarked unless it has acquired a secondary identification and the customers start associating it exclusively with the commodity.
Suggestive marks on the other hand indicate a specific feature of the product. However, consumers might have to stretch their imagination to identify the real relationship between the product and the mark as there is no obvious connection between the two. For instance, ‘Hush Puppies’ is a popular brand name that sells footwear products that guarantee comfort and prevent soreness of your feet. The basic reason behind the brand name is that the problem of sore feet is loosely referred to as ‘barking dogs’ in some states in the US.
Arbitrary marks are those marks that do not have any connection whatsoever with the commodity itself. For example, the use of trademark ‘Apple’ with a logo of a half eaten apple is not at all related to the computers sold under the mark. Likewise, there is no relationship between the fanciful name Exxon and the items sold under the name as the name is a fruit of the creative mind of the marketing agents of the firm.
The final category of generic marks clearly identifies the items, like ‘camping gear’, and they cannot be given any trademark protection due to lack of distinctiveness.
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categories: copyright,business idea protection,protecting business ideas,business value,Intellectual property,IP law,IP lawyer,trademarks,patents
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