My understanding of the relevant law is this: You can establish a trademark just by using it. There is no need to register it.
If someone else starts using it once you have established it, you can still sue them for infringement.
If you register it and someone else starts using it, you still need to sue them to make them stop.
The catch is, it is much easier to sue them if you have registered it. It means there is a presumption in your favour that the other side has to rebut, whereas if you don't register it, then you have to prove that it is established as a trademark.
So you need to figure out how likely you are to sue someone over it, and how much you want that extra ease of winning the case.
Tom
On 5/31/06,
Timothy Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, the cat's out of the bag. Apparently, I accidentally CC'd the
list with the Traversal logo (well, a version of it).
So, I was talking to Howard about registering it real quick, and he
had two thoughts about this. One is that the logo is going to be WAY
too hard to silkscreen onto something. When you start shrinking it
and playing about with it, it loses its definition. He also thinks
that it's not worth the $275. "If someone steals it, let them have
it; we'll make another one."
I'm interested in hearing opinions of others on this and if I can get
some help understanding the rules for registering a trademark, maybe
we'll register it anyway. The biggest drawback is that if someone
clones our products, they can use the logo, which is bad. So at some
point in the future, we need to register it.
I'm wondering if some of the artists can have a look at it to see if
we can make a version of it for silkscreening. I wrote a program to
produce the image, which I can share. The program can be configured
to produce various versions (the original with four substripes per
stripe, wide stripes, uniform-width stripes, and fewer stripes).
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