From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property (2014)

What is trademark law?

From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property (2014)

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What is trademark law?

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One of the most common questions that I get is, what is a trademark? And what is a service mark? And what's the difference between these? What can I trademark? Trademark's pretty easy. Trademark is anything capable of distinguishing you as the source of a good or a product. So it, it can be a brand name, it can be a color, it can be a sound, it can be a smell, it can be the shape of something. You know when you walk into a Starbucks, even if you don't see the Starbucks name, from the colors, the layout, the theme. You know when you're in an Apple store just by the way things are arranged and the windows and the tables. So, just about anything is capable, that's capable of distinguishing somebody or a company apart from others is capable of becoming a trademark. The most common trademarks are obvious. They're words. We have words like Panasonic, Kodak, Nike, Google, Amazon. These are household names and they're trademarks. Trademark can also include slogans. Nike's slogan is Just Do It. There are lots of slogans that tell you something about the brand but are essentially unique in that they identify the source of the goods, so that you know when you see the slogan, oh, that's from that company.

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