Categories Of Trademarks

Trademark safety is granted for words, logos and images that identify goods of one company as distinct from others. The main aim of trademarks is to ensure that the consumers are not subjected to any confusion in relation to the source of the product.

One of the critical requirements for a trademark is that it needs to be distinctly identifiable and different from other marks existing in the market. The uniqueness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its placement in one of the trademark categories - descriptive, fanciful, suggestive, and generic.

A descriptive mark uses a specific feature or quality of a product to differentiate it from other products of its type. Although a few descriptive marks that have acquired a secondary meaning in the marketplace, which the consumers can recognize as originating from a particular source, can be trademarked, this is not the general case as descriptive marks are rarely unique.

Suggestive marks are indicators towards a particular product feature or quality. However, the relation between the name and the product is not obviously perceptible and it might require some amount of guess work on the part of the consumers to comprehend it. For instance, the brand name known as ‘Hush Puppies’ points to a comfortable shoe range that makes sure that your feet do not become sore. The underlying reason behind such a name is that ‘barking dogs’ is used as a slang for sore feet in some states in America.

On the other hand, fanciful marks are those that are in no way related to the product. For instance, the use of the mark ‘Apple’ for computers is entirely disconnected from the product it signifies. Fanciful marks are those that do not have any usage in existing languages and have come from the imagination of the producer, such as ‘Exxon’.

Finally, generic marks are those that describe a general category of the item such as ‘olive oil’, and they cannot be granted any protection under trademark laws.

Source article: categories of trademarks.

Published by: Jonathan Petterson on November 3rd, 2009 | Filed under Trademarks



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