Categories Of Trademarks
Trademark is a kind of IPR that safeguards certain images, texts etc of a company from being wrongly used by others. The basic purpose of trademarks is to make sure that people can buy the right products without being influenced by the fake or counterfeited ones.
Trademark safety is granted for words, symbols and images that identify products of one company as distinct from others. The basic aim of trademarks is to ensure that consumers can buy the right products without being confused with fake or counterfeited ones.
One of the key needs for a trademark is that it should be different, which means it must be unique and identifiable. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its placement in one of the trademark categories - descriptive, arbitrary, suggestive, and generic.
A descriptive mark is one that describes a product with respect to its quality or characteristics like smell, function, dimensions etc. Although a few descriptive marks that have acquired a secondary meaning in the market, which the consumers can recognize as coming from a particular manufacturer, can be trademarked, this is not the general case as descriptive marks are hardly ever unique.
Suggestive marks are indicators to a particular product aspect or quality. However, the relationship between the name and the product is not obviously evident and it might require some amount of guess work on the part of the customers to comprehend it. For instance, the shoes named 'Hush Puppies' are suggestive of comfortable shoes, which make sure that your feet do not become sore. The underlying reason behind such a name is that 'barking dogs' is slang for sore feet in some states in the US.
Fanciful marks are those marks that do not have any connection whatsoever with the commodity itself. For example, the use of trademark 'Apple' with a logo of a half bitten apple is not at all linked to the computers sold under the mark. Similarly, there is no relationship between the fanciful name Exxon and the items sold under the name as it is a fruit of the imagination of the marketing agents of the company.
Finally, generic marks are ones which represent a very broad category of items like 'olive oil' and are afforded no safety under the existing trademark laws.
Trademark safety is granted for words, symbols and images that identify products of one company as distinct from others. The basic aim of trademarks is to ensure that consumers can buy the right products without being confused with fake or counterfeited ones.
One of the key needs for a trademark is that it should be different, which means it must be unique and identifiable. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its placement in one of the trademark categories - descriptive, arbitrary, suggestive, and generic.
A descriptive mark is one that describes a product with respect to its quality or characteristics like smell, function, dimensions etc. Although a few descriptive marks that have acquired a secondary meaning in the market, which the consumers can recognize as coming from a particular manufacturer, can be trademarked, this is not the general case as descriptive marks are hardly ever unique.
Suggestive marks are indicators to a particular product aspect or quality. However, the relationship between the name and the product is not obviously evident and it might require some amount of guess work on the part of the customers to comprehend it. For instance, the shoes named 'Hush Puppies' are suggestive of comfortable shoes, which make sure that your feet do not become sore. The underlying reason behind such a name is that 'barking dogs' is slang for sore feet in some states in the US.
Fanciful marks are those marks that do not have any connection whatsoever with the commodity itself. For example, the use of trademark 'Apple' with a logo of a half bitten apple is not at all linked to the computers sold under the mark. Similarly, there is no relationship between the fanciful name Exxon and the items sold under the name as it is a fruit of the imagination of the marketing agents of the company.
Finally, generic marks are ones which represent a very broad category of items like 'olive oil' and are afforded no safety under the existing trademark laws.
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