How to Enforce Your Trademark Rights

Trademark registration is an important and sometimes even difficult step towards your brand building but nothing ends there. As a matter of fact, the more successful you are, the more important becomes the brand protection. Remember that there is no “trademark police” so you are responsible for your trademark enforcement and protection. There will be people who will try to use and register similar trademarks or even identical to yours and by doing so, they will reduce your earnings and harm your brand’s reputation. What can you do to prohibit this? Here are the essentials:

➡️ Be active in using your trademark – Owning a trademark is hard, but losing rights over it is quite easy if you stop using it. There are many courts that will consider the trademark abandoned if you don’t use it for 3 years.
➡️ Hire a service or monitor yourself – You should regularly check the USPTO for new filings that might be similar to your trademark. Furthermore, a good idea would be to check the market for products similar to your own. Depending on the volume of work, you can do it yourself or hire a specialized firm.
➡️ Enforce your rights – Let’s suppose that you identified an infringer. What’s next? A cease-and-desist letter would be an essential start. There are numerous cases where this is successful and eliminates the need of filing a lawsuit. Many times, infringements happen involuntarily and the other side is likely to quit. Ultimately if the letter doesn’t do anything, the lawsuit is the final step. If you are right and they are infringing your trademark, the court order will force them to stop using your trademark, pay damages, pay even for the court and your legal costs etc.
Trademark symbolizes your business reputation so enforcing and protecting it should be one of your priorities while running a business.