Trademark registration in the USA

Marks here are registered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and one register covers all fifty states. What that office wants is unusual: not only that the sign is free, but that it is being used to sell something.

A brand that has to stand on several registers at once is a wider job: filing marks, patents and copyright. The rest of what a business meets there is on the United States page.

Proof of use, and what counts as proof

The office asks for a specimen: the mark as customers meet it. For goods that means the mark on the product, its packaging, an attached label, or a display at the point of sale. For a service it means the mark in advertising, tied directly to the service being sold.

What it refuses is as telling. A mock-up, a printer’s proof or a copy of the drawing filed with the application is not a specimen, and a web page used as one has to carry its address and capture date.

What the office charges, and what for

The published amounts are per class, and several of them are triggered by how the application is written rather than by what it claims.

Four ways onto the federal register

You already sell there

The dates of first use and a specimen go in from the start. The shortest route, and the only one with nothing left to prove afterwards.

You have not started yet

A bona fide intention to use is enough to file. Acceptance produces a notice of allowance, and the statement of use behind it can never be pushed past thirty-six months from that notice.

You hold the mark at home

An application or registration in your own country can carry the filing, so nothing has to be sold in America on the day it goes in.

You come through the international register

An extension of protection costs more per class and buys six months to answer instead of three. The American examination happens either way.

What the file needs from you

• The owner as it will stand on the register: the company that controls the mark, not whoever registered the domain.
• Goods and services from the office’s own manual wherever they fit, because departing from it is priced.
• A specimen for each class, showing the mark the way it reaches a buyer.
• The dates of first use, where the application says the mark is already in trade.
• An attorney licensed in the United States, where the owner’s domicile is outside the country.

Watching the names that appear next to yours afterwards is brand protection.

Sources: amounts are set by 37 CFR 2.6 and surcharges by 2.22; reply periods in 2.62, specimens in 2.56, the thirty-six months in 2.89, opposition in 2.102, the sixth year in 2.160.