While federal registration technically does not give rise to a trademark right, it can definitely help in protecting and enforcing that right. In the federal scheme, registration of your mark confers protection within the entire United States and serves to put others on notice that the mark is exclusively yours for use in connection with the goods and services identified in your registration. A federally registered trademark also carries with it a presumption of validity. The federal trademark laws further provide that once you have used your mark continuously for five years after registration, it becomes incontestable and much more difficult to invalidate.

Because the registration of your mark puts others on notice, when it becomes necessary to enforce your trademark rights against someone using your mark or a confusingly similar mark without your permission, monetary and injunctive remedies and procedural advantages available only in federal court may all be realized.

While conventional federal trademark registration and all state registrations are based on actual use in commerce, the federal trademark scheme includes one further registration option that provides trademark owners with a potentially tremendous advantage. Under only the federal laws, even if your mark has not yet been used in interstate commerce, so long as you have a genuine intent to do so within the six months following registration, you can file what is known as an Intent-to-Use (“ITU”) trademark application.

The ITU application essentially allows you to protect or preserve your rights in a mark before you actually launch your product or service bearing the mark. This will buy you some time to prepare for your market introduction while minimizing the risk that someone else will commence use of the same or a confusingly similar mark in the intervening time.

If you have not used the mark in commerce by the end of the six-month period, extensions of time can be requested for a total of up to thirty additional months. Thus, it is possible that through an ITU trademark application you can reserve rights in a mark not yet used in commerce two to three years beyond the date on which the application is first filed.

Whether you wait for actual interstate sales of goods or services under the mark or would prefer to file based on intent to make such sales, the fee per mark is $625 either way for one International Class of goods/services (additional classes being charged at roughly $325 per class).  With the Intent-to-Use application, the extra cost that would be incurred is approximately $300 for later filing a Statement of Use or Amendment to Allege Use, as the case may be.

We can prepare the federal trademark application within a few days of authorization and payment of a full deposit, and it can be filed electronically so that we obtain the serial number and filing date that same day.  It then takes approximately a year to eighteen months to complete the registration process.

So, if you are interested in obtaining federal trademark protection for your trademark, or simply would like more information, we invite you to call 949-250-5800 or email us to schedule your FREE initial consultation, during which we can explain your trademark options to you in more detail and answer any follow-up questions that you may have.

In the meantime, even absent a federal trademark registration, or while a federal trademark application is pending, you are entitled to use a superscript ^TM adjacent your trademark, which places society on notice that you are asserting at least common law trademark rights in that mark.