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A trademark is a word, phrase, or logo that identifies the source of goods or services. [1] Trademark law protects a business' commercial identity or brand by discouraging other businesses from adopting a name or logo that is "confusingly similar" to an existing trademark.
Trademark law is designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. By identifying the commercial source of products and services, trademarks facilitate the identification of products and services which meet the expectations of ...
Intersection of trademark law with public domain works; Passing off: Majority: Scalia: Lanham Act: Trademark cannot preserve copyright-like rights to a public domain work. The Lanham Act prohibits both "passing off" (misrepresenting one's own goods or services as someone else's) and "reverse passing off" (misrepresenting someone else's goods as ...
In the context of trademarks, this expansion has been driven by international efforts to harmonise the definition of "trademark", as exemplified by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ratified in 1994, which formalized regulations for IP rights that had been handled by common law, or not at all, in member states.
Fair use of trademarks is more limited than that which exists in the context of copyright. Many trademarks are adapted from words or symbols that are common to the culture, as Apple, Inc. using a trademark that is based upon the apple. Other trademarks are invented by the mark owner (such as Kodak) and have no common use until introduced by the ...
Trademark distinctiveness is an important concept in the law governing trademarks and service marks. A trademark may be eligible for registration, or registrable, if it performs the essential trademark function, and has distinctive character. Registrability can be understood as a continuum, with "inherently distinctive" marks at one end ...
(That a company plans to use a certain trademark might itself be protectable as a trade secret, however, until the mark is actually made public.) [56] To acquire a trademark rights under U.S. law, one must simply use the mark "in commerce". [57] It is possible to register a trademark in the United States, both at the federal and state levels.
The Trademark Law Treaty (TLT) is a 1994 treaty entered into by a large number of countries establishing procedures for recognizing trademarks registered in other member countries. It operates under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization .