Securing trademark rights is incredibly important for any brand owner. What many brand owners don’t realize is that the trademark registration isn’t the only end goal; they also need to protect their marks. You can effectively protect your marks against infringement, dilution (when multiple parties use your trademark and it consequently loses strength), and tarnishment (when someone uses your trademark in a bad light) by monitoring your trademarks.
How it Works
We use Alt Legal’s Trademark Protection services, which provide highly-focused trademark monitoring at an accessible cost. We’re pleased to pass the cost-savings on to you. By way of background, Alt Legal is a leading trademark management provider, managing over 1 million IP assets and working with over 1,000 leading law firms and Fortune 500 companies.
Alt Legal Trademark Protection uses automation and machine learning to provide important insight into potential infringement across your entire US trademark portfolio, with a two-layered approach to help you enforce your trademark rights.
- Trademark Application Match: Alt Legal uses an algorithm to detect newly-filed USPTO applications that have significantly overlapping literal elements with marks in your portfolio. Trademark Application Match will identify identical marks and in cases where there are multiple literal elements in the mark, it will identify marks with 2 or more literal elements that match. Given its focused approach, Trademark Application Match doesn’t look for phonetic equivalents, misspellings, or translations.
- §2(d) Trademark Watch: Alt Legal evaluates applications that have been examined by the USPTO and have received a §2(d) Office Action citing likelihood of confusion with one of your marks. Alt Legal will also inform us if the applicant overcomes that refusal and the potentially infringing mark proceeds to publication. Given that the USPTO does not notify mark owners about this potential infringement, this service provides an invaluable second layer of defense.
Subscribing to Trademark Monitoring
We are happy to offer a cost-effective and precision-driven trademark monitoring subscription plan. The annual cost of trademark monitoring with Alt Legal would be: $[##] to monitor up to ____ marks and $[##] to monitor up to ___ marks.
With this, we’ll monitor: (1) Newly-filed USPTO trademark applications where literal elements substantially overlap with your marks; and (2) Applications that are refused based on likelihood of confusion with your mark. We will provide at least [monthly/quarterly] reports summarizing all potential conflicts and recommended courses of action.
This monitoring plan does not look for marks that sound similar, rhyme, that are translations, or contain misspellings, as other more expensive monitoring services would. Additionally, we are happy to provide read-only access to our docketing software so you can view the status of your marks.
Let us know how many marks you’d like to monitor (get in touch with us if you’d like full US trademark portfolio pricing) and we’ll send you a link to submit payments through [payment service].