Your brand is important.  In today’s fluid market environment and multiplicity of similar goods and services, it is crucial.  For many goods and services, brand and what it represents to consumers is the primary value, the critical variable in the profit margin.  You need to protect your brand – your URL, your logo, your name.  Trademark and unfair competition law offers you this protection.

Registering your marks – your name, logo, designs – wherever you are doing significant business is important to keep others from harvesting your hard-earned goodwill.

A trademark is any word, symbol, design or other device that identifies the source of goods and services.  Trademark law, together with state and federal unfair competition laws, protect consumers from the fraudulent use of other people’s trade and service marks.  This, of course, also protects your business from other people appropriating your brand or anything close enough to it to confuse consumers.  If someone is likely to be confused into thinking that someone else’s goods are yours or that someone else is somehow sponsored by or affiliated with you, the law may provide a remedy.  

The U.S. and foreign jurisdictions provide registration regimes to help you protect your trade and service marks.  A trademark registration is useful, and in some jurisdictions, essential, to protecting your name, logo and brand.  At a minimum, a trademark registration establishes your priority (who used it first), puts others on notice and evidences your ownership of the mark, and permits you to pursue infringers in federal court if in the U.S.  In some jurisdictions and cases, a trademark registration is necessary to claim any rights in your brand at all.  Without it, you may be leaving others open to harvesting the goodwill you have won with hard work and investment through advertising and other marketing.