A trademark is a recognizable symbol for a company’s products, while a service mark is used for services. Registering a service mark offers benefits such as evidence of ownership and legal presumption. The process involves searching for existing marks and completing an application with a fee.
A trademark is a very familiar concept and symbol that signals a recognizable brand of a company’s products, i.e. its “brand”. An unregistered trademark is designated as . Registered, appears as. A service mark is a parallel usage to a trademark, but it is used for services rather than goods. In many of its explanations and definitions, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) actually uses the word trademark to refer to trademarks and service marks.
The official USPTO definition of a service mark is “any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination, used or intended to be used in commerce, to identify and distinguish the services of one provider from those provided by others, and to indicate the source of the services”. While registration of a service mark is not required, it does offer several important benefits, including evidence of ownership, legal presumption of ownership, and the ability to use the file as the basis for filing foreign registrations. An unregistered service mark is indicated by the abbreviation SM. The registered symbol is the same as for registered trademarks.
There are several steps to acquiring a service mark registration. The first is to determine that a service mark is the appropriate type of intellectual property to create and prototype a mark. At the same time, it is necessary to search the USPTO trademark and service mark database to be aware of existing rights to various marks that may bear a resemblance to the proposed service mark. The “Design Search Code Handbook” categorizes brand designs and assists in searching for them, and the search can be performed at the Trademark Public Search Library in Alexandria, Virginia. If a potentially conflicting trademark is discovered, the Trademark Applications and Registrations Recovery (TARR) database can be used to discover the current status of the trademark.
Once the design is cleared as non-conflicting, the application should complete. This includes a description of the service that the service tag is intended to represent. It also includes a clear description of the service mark to be registered. There is a fee involved in the registration process, which can take several years. Often, the services of an attorney are purchased for service mark registration.
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