All language subtitles for 2. Trademarks Overview

In this lesson, you learn everything you need to know about trademarks in the context of poddy and

how to do a trademark search before you upload a design.

A trademark is a mark, usually words or pictures or a combination of the two that designates the origin

of particular goods or services and that consumers use to differentiate between brands.

A trademark protects indications of origin for goods and services, including words and symbols.

Your designs trademark grants you the right to prevent others from using similar marks to sell or market

related goods or services.

So how do you do trademark search of a design or phrase?

Ideally, performing a trademark search on your T-shirt designs phrase or saying should be step one

before even going on the designing part of the process.

This way you avoid wasting a lot of valuable time in case the phrase you decided to go buy has been

registered by someone else.

The US PTO Trademark Registry can be searched at the trademark electronic search system, but bear in

mind that Marks don't need to be identical in order to present a conflict.

Trademark infringement is a legal standard, one that is not necessarily intuitive.

And it may be worth engaging an attorney who can perform a clearance search and advise you on the risks

of adopting a mark.

Step one used to assess to do a trademark search on your design.

You can access this tool by following the link, which I'm going to leave for you below.

I'm also going to demonstrate so we can practice together and show you how it works.

Step to type your design phrase, you'll see a search bar, type the phrase or quote you plan to use

in your design.

This will records for that specific word choice.

Step three, review and analyze existing records.

You will find several columns.

Keep in mind that not all of the records that show up have approved trademarks.

It's important that you learn the difference between the serial and registration number of a mark.

The serial number is assigned when applying to a trademark.

It does not guarantee that the trademark will be approved.

The registration number, however, is assigned to a mark once the US PTO approval process is completed.

So find the mark that has both a serial and a registration number and is live, then review it to see

what's filed and the goods and services.

If the goods and services for the market do not relate to T-shirts or apparel items or telephone accessories,

you are good to go for t shirts and apparel items.

It's CLOs zero to five and four pop sockets and phone cases.

It's glass zero zero nine.

Now, here's the tricky part.

If there's a mark with t shirts and their goods and services, but it hasn't been approved yet, you

could go ahead and upload the design with that word into much.

But keep in mind that if and when the markets are approved, you have to take that design down to avoid

issues related to violating their trademark and potentially losing your merch by Amazon accounts.

If you'd like to review additional information about trademark search to protect your T-shirt designs

and avoid copyright infringements, I do recommend seeking legal advice to stay on the safe side, not

just from search by Amazon, but to protect your business in general.

I'd recommend using Murchie and former Trademark Protection Extension, which searches your listing

for trademarks, words or phrases while you're creating the listing.

And you can even perform a search for trademarks on any product page.

So you can see if a particular design that you're considering is trademarked or not.

Same form also has a trademarks module inside the software, which also gives you trademark alerts as

soon as certain keywords become trademarked.

I'm going to go through it shortly so we can practice together and you can see how it all works.