From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

What is trademark law?

From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

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What is trademark law?

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- [Presenter] What is Trademark Law? One of the most common questions I get is, "What is a trademark? And what is a service mark?" And what's the difference between these? What can I trademark?" Among other areas of IP law, trademark's pretty easy. The trademark is anything capable of distinguishing you as the source of a good or a service. So it can be a brand name, it can be a color, it can be a sound, it can even be a smell. It can even be the shape of something. You know when you walk into a Starbucks, even if you don't see the Starbucks name, just from the colors, the layout, the theme. You know when you're in an Apple store, just by the way things are arranged and the windows and the tables. So just about anything that's capable of distinguishing somebody or a company apart from others is capable of becoming a trademark. The most common trademarks are obvious. They're words. Words that uniquely signify the source of goods or services. We have words like Panasonic, Kodak, Nike, Google, Amazon. These are household names and they're trademarks. Trademarks can include slogans. Nike's slogan is "Just Do It". There are lots of slogans that tell you something about the brand, but are essentially unique in the way that they identify the source of the goods so that you know when you see the slogan, "Oh, that's from that company."

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