Categories Of Trademarks
Author: Elizabeth Brown
Trademark safety is granted for terms, logos and graphics that identify products of one firm as different from others. The basic purpose of trademarks is to make sure that consumers can buy the right products without being influenced by the spurious or counterfeited ones.
One of the essential needs for a trademark is that it must be distinctive, which means it must be exclusive and recognizable. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its placement in one of the trademark categories – descriptive, arbitrary, suggestive, and generic.
A descriptive mark is representative of the quality or some other features of the product like its function or form. Unlike other marks that are exclusive to a particular commodity, a descriptive mark is not unique and is not capable of being trademarked unless it has taken a secondary identification and the customers begin associating it exclusively with the commodity.
Suggestive marks, as is evident by the name, suggest an essential feature of the good. However, it is often the case that the mark and the commodity do not show any obvious connection and the customers might have to guess the link between the two. For instance, footwear named ‘Hush Puppies’ are suggestive of comfortable shoes, which ensure that your feet do not become sore. The basic reason behind the brand name is that sore feet are loosely referred to as ‘barking dogs’ in certain American states.
Fanciful marks on the other hand have no relationship whatsoever with the nature or quality of the item. For instance, the use of trademark ‘Apple’ with a logo of a half eaten apple is in no way related to the computers marketed under the mark. In a similar way, arbitrary marks are those that come from the creative mind of the manufacturer or come from archaic languages like Latin.
Lastly generic marks are the ones that describe a general category of the item like ‘olive oil’, and they cannot be granted any protection under trademark laws.
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Sphere: Related ContentTags: business, business value, ideas protection, Intellectual property, IP law, IP lawyer, patents, protecting business ideas, trademarks
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This work by heave-ho is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
