Seminar A: Protecting Your Company's Trademarks

One of the critical differences between trademarks and other forms of intellectual property (copyrights and patents) is that, if used properly, trademarks can remain the exclusive property of their owners forever. The rub, however, is that frequently trademarks are not used properly. In many cases, a trademark owner's own, improper advertising or labeling contributed to the loss of a valuable trademark. In other situations, trademark owners failed to encourage and police the public to treat their trademarks as the designation for a particular brand of a product. Instead, they allowed their trademarks to "go generic" -- to become the name for a type of product which, under the trademark laws, is fatal. For example, DuPont discovered too late that it was not using the term "Cellophane" properly as a trademark, and DuPont lost what could have been an extremely valuable trademark. This seminar is designed to assist companies in selecting appropriate trademarks from both a legal and marketing perspective. It also explores the "Ten Commandments" of trademark protection to help companies avoid their trademarks from going generic. Finally, the seminar discusses how companies can avoid being "held-up" by graphic artists who prepare logos for companies and who assert rights under the copyright laws to a company's logo.