- Keeping Track of Your Competitors’ Intellectual Property - January 7, 2015
- When Does Your Website Become Your Greatest Risk? - October 2, 2014
- How Long Does it Take to Get a Patent? - April 3, 2014
As businesses grow and develop, so does its intellectual property (IP) assets. And if these businesses are engaging in proper IP management, they are filing trademark and patent applications to protect their IP. However, because of the public nature of both trademark and patent prosecutions, one may get an inkling of their competitors’ business plans if they monitor these application filings. Though not a perfect way to predict the exact nature of your competitors’ future offerings, keeping track of your competitor’s intellectual property filings can be a guide to where your competitors are moving.
Trademarks
A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, or design that identifies and distinguishes a source of goods and services. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) allows entities to file trademark applications before the marks are in use under the Bona Fide Intent To Use basis. That way, businesses can secure their branding before their product or service offering is fully commercialized. Pending trademark applications are available online for public viewing approximately a week or two after their submission. Using the online database, trademark applications can be searched using the owner name. For example, if you do a search using Microsoft as the owner, you will find numerous pending trademark applications, many of these filed under the Bona Fide Intent To Use basis. Some of these Bona Fide Intent To Use marks, such as Battle Toads, Eden Falls, and Screamride are being applied for as marks to cover video/computer games. This may indicate that Microsoft wants to expand its footprint in the video/computer game market, with the word marks potentially indicating the nature of these games.
Patent Applications
Another way to track competitors is to monitor their patent application filings. Entities apply for patents to protect inventions that they intend to become commercialized products. Before the America Invents Act (AIA), inventors were the applicants for patents and assignments were not always recorded with the USPTO, since it was not required to do so. However, as of September 16, 2012, the AIA allows assignees to be applicants, bringing the US in line with the rest of the world. And because of this, potentially more businesses have their names on patent applications. The USPTO and other databases allow you to search patent applications by assignee (or applicant) name. The caveat, however, is that patent applications are not published until 18 months from their priority date. So there is a blackout period where applications are confidential and not able to be found on the patent databases. But as it takes approximately three years in the US before an application becomes an issued patent (or becomes abandoned), it is still possible to track your competitors’ developing products, especially because it may take several years before a commercialized version of the invention is finalized and put up for sale.
Monitoring Intellectual Property
Businesses should either set up internal procedures to track their competitors’ Intellectual Property filings, or if they can afford it, outsource the tracking to companies who specialize in tracking IP. Tracking your competitors’ IP not only lets you know what your competitors are up to, but may also be a guide to direct your business’ product development. You can assess the quality of your competitors’ potential products and can compare it to your current and potential products. Similarly you can assess whether the market will become too crowded for a certain type of product (too many patent applications filed on similar inventions), or discover whether one of your developing products could potentially be infringing the claims in a competitor’s application which may ultimately issue as a patent, affording you the opportunity to “design around” your competitor’s invention.
When you get a registered trademark from the USPTO, you are required to pay maintenance fees between the 5th and 6th years, at 10 years, and then every 10 years afterwards. The USPTO will send courtesy reminders. If you had an attorney do the filing, they should also remind you. Outside of that, any company saying you need to pay them to put in a registry, or some other public search system is a scam. You are already on USPTO registry which is a public record and is searchable by anyone (unfortunately this why these scammers get your information). As for monitoring, you as trademark owner have the duty to “police” your mark, the USPTO will not do that. Policing your mark means if you discover an infringer, you need to take appropriate action or risk weakening your rights. There are businesses who will do this monitoring for price. For a small business, this price is usually too high to justify. However I suspect many of the companies that try to solicit sales directly to the trademark owner using the info from their USPTO files can be scams as well, though there are legit company that corporations use to do monitoring. You should try to monitor for infringement through online searches, and keeping track of industry competitors through tradeshows, their advertising, their online presence, their social media posts. etc.
We received our registered trademark for our business name and logo from the USPTO. We are excited and a bit confused too!
Since our receipt from the U.S. Trademark office of the official notice and certificate, we’ve been receiving many emails and letters from law firms and other service companies implying we need to do more to protect it.
Some of the letters say we need to pay them to keep the registered trademark and other say we need to things to make certain others don’t take it and use it (I am paraphrasing).
Could you please clarify what we should be monitoring or if this is just a scam? Thank you!