We are pretty lucky to have an attorney in the Sola community who just so happens to be not only a well-established barber but also one of our 2018 Faces of Sola. You may remember Chris Matthew from Dillinger’s Hair Company and his astute business advice he provided our community with a couple months back. Well, he’s back and he is going to give us a lesson in understanding trademarks. To help you navigate the wonderful world of trademarks, we proposed a series of questions that one would ask to have a better understanding: Do I need a trademark registration to be in business? “No,” he explains, “but if you want to be a brand, registering your mark may be the move. “Contrary to popular belief, not every business needs a registered trademark. You can be perfectly successful without registering your mark or using a common or descriptive name for your business. There are probably thousands of successful Gino’s Pizzas in the country but only a handful have bothered to attempt to register their marks.” What exactly then is “a trademark?” “By definition,” Chris shares, “a trademark is a distinctive symbol, design, word or phrase, used by an individual, business, or other entity to indicate that the product or service with which the trademark appears, originates from a specific source.” Okay, can you maybe put it in a simpler way of understanding? “Simply put, a trademark serves to link a product or service to a particular company or provider,” he explains. “Your trademark says: ‘buy me’ because I come from ‘ABC’ company. It’s a symbol of the goodwill (or lack thereof) of the owner's goods or services. Your hope is that someone will hear your name or see your logo and immediately think, ‘I like that company. I’ll buy from them again.’ Why would a business or brand then need them? “The overarching purpose of a trademark is to allow the public to recognize the goods or services as those of a particular company. First, it seeks to prevent the public from being confused about the source of the goods or services. This way, every time you eat a Big Mac you know it came from McDonald's and not some imitation burger joint, like McDowells. Further, by making products easier to identify with trademarks, companies have an incentive to invest in the quality of their goods. If they don’t, the public will associate their mark with poor quality or service.” “Secondarily,” Chris continues, “a trademark helps to ensure that the trademark owner, and not an imitative competitor, will reap the rewards associated with a desirable product. Let’s use Big Mac again as an example. The idea is to protect the provider of the goods and services; the companies. By allowing a trademark owner to monopolize a particular phrase, logo or symbol, creators can profit from their work. Imagine if a low-quality hair company was able to freely use the Vidal Sassoon name or something similar. The public would be misled and Sassoon’s reputation would suffer as well as their bottom line. By acting as source indicators, trademarks attempt to promise a consistent level of quality thereby helping the consumer to decide whether to purchase a product or service again or to avoid an undesirable one.” Well, that makes more sense. But what makes a mark capable of protection? “Two basic requirements must be met for a mark to be eligible for trademark protection: it must be in use in commerce and it must be distinctive. “The main requirement for something to be capable of trademark protection is that it is distinctive and thereby capable of identifying a particular good or service. Distinctiveness is the reason ‘Google’ can be a registered trademark and Pizza cannot. Before Google decided to use the term to identify its search engine, the term didn't exist; so it's very distinctive. The term Pizza does not and can never identify a particular pizza parlor or brand because “Pizza” is necessary to identify Pizza. If a single owner could monopolize a term like pizza then the rest of the pizza places in the world or at least in the country would have to come up with a new way to describe their pizza-like product –and that would just be stupid right?” What are some strengths of marks? “All trademarks are not equal,” Chris adds. “Some are strong, some are weak and most are somewhere in between. When first registering a mark for protection, we look at the mark along a spectrum. The spectrum ranges in strength from generic to descriptive to suggestive to arbitrary/fanciful. “The more distinctive a mark is, and the more well known the mark becomes, the wider the mark’s scope of protection will be: Generic: A generic term for a product or service cannot be registered for trademark protection. Remember our pizza example? You cannot protect the word “pizza” for your pizza parlor or “salon” for your salon. If the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) allowed you to monopolize p