What is a Trademark?

A Trademark is the means by which a business makes itself visible in the marketplace. A Trademark can be any distinctive (not solely descriptive) name or logo. The best Trademarks are instantly recognizable and conjure up in the minds of existing or potential customers things like quality, dependability, or at the very least the source of the goods or services being bought.

A trademark is often defined as: “a word, name, symbol or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others”.A service mark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and service marks.

Trademarks provide their owners with the legal right to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark. They cannot be used stop competitors from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark.

Examples of well-known Trademarks are: 

Coca-Cola, 

Rolls-Royce, 

The Apple logo and 

the Nike “swoosh”

Posted in: TRADEMARK