We believe the approach to your brand should have a single voice, reflected in your trademark, advertising and social media. Our attorneys prioritize the importance of protecting your brand and will be vigilant in helping you strategically guard your marks.

Areas of concentration include:

• Trademark Preparation and Prosecution
• Advertising
• TTAB
• Copyright

We have managed trademarks, service marks and certification marks in an array of industries including consumer goods, food production, transportation, retail, manufacturing, clothing, food and beverage, professional services, financial products and services, banking, health care, franchising, restaurants, electronics, software product and services, and many more.

In protecting your trademarks, we provide services in:

• Trademark searches and clearances
• Trademark registration
• Brand acquisition
• Trademark branding strategy
• Cancelation and opposition and other proceedings before the Trademark Office and Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).

Copyright

In addition, we can help you protect work that needs copyright protection, an increasingly complex task in the world of digital media. Our work in copyright protection includes:

• Copyright registration and recordation
• Assignments of copyright
• Fair use counseling
• Mechanical and statutory royalties counseling
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act compliance

Portfolio Management and IP Asset Management

Securing rights for your IP is just the first step. The changing nature of our regulatory and business environments creates situations in which initial protections, if left alone, might be weakened or, in extreme cases, nullified. Our lawyers will help you create an active management plan, designed to track and enforce your IP rights and protections for copyrights and trademarks.

Internet & Domain Strategy

As federal and state laws push back against the internet and its freewheeling nature, you need to know how your business may be affected. Through proactive counsel and strategic guidance, we can help you understand how and where your internet start-up or established virtual operation might be affected by laws such as:

• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
• Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA)
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
• Communication Decency Act (CDA)
• Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign)
• CAN-SPAM Act

We will unpack the legal risks and provide critical assistance with regard to the development and protection of digital intellectual property assets.

In addition, you can turn to us for assistance with developing your internet strategy, domain name portfolio and a plan to manage your presence going forward. Services include:

• Defensive domain name registrations
• Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) proceedings
• Registrar consolidation
• Cost estimates of continued registrations
• Registrar transfers
• Individual and global registrant corrections
• Use of domain name recovery services to obtain expired domain name registrations from others
• NAD and NARB false advertising dispute resolution

We also assist with domain name dispute resolution, including monitoring services for locating conflicts, objecting to conflicting domain names, and meta-tag and sponsor match disputes. We are experienced in resolving disputes through negotiated settlements that include a transfer of the contested domain name to our client. We also have successfully used the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) arbitration process to obtain conflicting domain name registrations and have litigated to recover conflicting domain names.

IP-Related Advertising/Media

Media and advertising is a creative process and often involves unique works and technology that give rise to certain protectable intellectual property rights of the client and/or their competitors. We advise clients regarding advertising and media from an IP perspective for print, radio and television broadcasts, art, graphics, music, videos, slogan, sound telemarketing, text messaging, emails and web-based advertising, including the software engine behind any digital advertising.

Good advertisement techniques are a target of imitators, hence the need for IP rights. Businesses need to be aware of the IP rights that can come into play when creating content for an advertisement or running an advertising campaign. We advise clients regarding their and their competitors’ creative content, all of which may be protectable by way of copyright. We also advise on branding efforts, some of which may be protectable by trademark, trade dress, design patents and/or industrial designs, and on digital advertising, which may involve technology that is protectable by way of patent. We also advise clients regarding rights of publicity and privacy as they relate to IP. Please see our Communications & Media page for our other work in the area of privacy and rights of publicity.                                           

We can assist in matters involving unfair advertising methods, including false advertising claims, false endorsement of products, deceptive packaging, dishonest promotions or marketing, as prohibited by unfair competition laws.

We help businesses with developing appropriate IP strategies to protect their advertising creations by procuring IP rights, including registering the advertisement and other copyright protected material (including a website) with the national copyright office in the U.S. and in other countries internationally as available. We assist with registering trademarks and registering trademarks as domain names and provide counsel on using trademarks consistently and properly in promotional media and advertising material and content.  We advise on patenting innovative advertising technologies and online business methods in countries where such protection is available, as well as preventing inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets in media and advertising.

Using a celebrity image can grab consumer attention and create a perception of value and credibility for a product or service, but in many countries, the name, face, image, voice and likeness of an individual are protected by privacy and publicity rights. We advise clients regarding the right of privacy, which gives a person the right to protect their image from certain uses. The right of publicity recognizes that a person’s image has an economic value that is presumed to be the result of the person’s own effort.

We also advise clients regarding unfair competition when a company compares the relative qualities of its products and services with those of named competitors without conflicting with trademark laws or unfair competition laws.  We provide counsel on matters related to derogatory or defamatory comparisons or deceptive comparisons.

A lack of caution can lead to the loss of a company’s own IP rights or liability for infringing the IP rights of others. To avoid costly mistakes, businesses should conduct rigorous checks from the general legal perspective and from an IP perspective before launching a new advertising campaign.