Trademarking!

Hello All Grove City Garage Door Inc. Fans! I am Tracy Fairchild (Mark Rothwell's girlfriend) and the website/advertising administrator of Grove City Garage Door Inc.

Today I would like to cover a topic that no one seems to really understand: Trademarking!

What is a trademark? A trademark is a string of words, a logo, or both that a corporation is claiming as their claim to fame! For example: McDonalds, Wendys, White Castle, Gas Monkey Garage,  etc., well you get the picture are all trademarks of corporations with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. These corporations have the legal right to sue if you try to use their trademark for any kind of advertising or use without authorization.

Grove City Garage Door is a trademarked string of words with the United States Patent and Trademark Office also. Grove City Garage Door Inc. owns this trademark and has the right to protect the trademark in a court of law.

Check for yourself: USTPO Trademark Search

Why Trademark? Grove City Garage Door Inc. decided to trademark the term Grove City Garage Door when we seen 5-6 other companies using that term to advertise for their own company. We tried to ask Google to remove the offenders from the Pay to Click advertising and got a big fat NO! Google will not remove the offending Pay to Click ad using the term Grove City Garage Door because it was not trademarked with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Google will not remove the offenders that have went out and created websites. So now we have to hire an IP Lawyer to start getting some of the websites removed from the indexes.

Trademark Process: The trademark process is not a short process, it could take 6 months to a year to get your trademark approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. First step is to search the USTPO website to see if anyone owns your trademark. If no one owns the trademark the next step is to decide if you have a logo to trademark or just words. We went with just words in 2011. We filed our claim, paid our fees, and waited for an answer. The USTPO office contacted us to ask questions about our trademark, how long we had been using the trademark, and proof of the length of time. You see there are two kinds of trademarks: Intent to use in commerce and use in commerce. Intent to use means that someday you intend to use the trademark in commerce, you have to start using the trademark within 3-5 years after approval. Use in commerce means that you have used the trademark for more than 5 years, since we have been using the trademark since 1999 this qualified for more than 5 years. The USTPO lawyer approved our application for trademark and sent it out for a 30 day period of petition. Petition time means that anyone has the right to file a petition as to why the trademark should not be given or approved. If no one submits a petition against your trademark application then your trademark will be approved and go live.

Trademark Protection: Absolutely no one will protect your trademark! Many companies will try to use your trademark while advertising! What can you do? You can contact a lawyer to have this lawyer send out cease and desist letters. Once a cease and desist letter goes out, then you can file a police report for cyber harassment. You CANNOT file a police report without first sending out the cease and desist letter, the offenders have to be warned to stop. Then the next step would be to spend tons of money with lawyers and courts proving that the offending company used your mark without authorization. I don't know about you, but we are NOT in the lawyer paying business, we are in the garage door business!

Creative Trademark Protection: Currently we are searching for other ways to protect our trademark online. We are investigating a few companies that say they have a solution to remove offending websites from Google indexes. But of course there are fees involved! We do contact offending companies ourselves first, and if they will not comply then we have to get our lawyer involved. We prefer that the offending companies comply willingly because as I have said, we are NOT in the lawyer business! We have found some argumentative website management companies in the process who either do not understand trademarks or just do not do their research about trademarks. Grove City Garage Door Inc. has the sole ownership of the term Grove City Garage Door and we do have the legal right to sue any unauthorized use of our trademark in a court of law!

Grove City Garage Door Inc. does NOT practice using any other companies' name or trademark in our advertising. I do research the trademark website frequently so that we can avoid being sued for using someone's trademark. I also do not want to confuse our customers in our advertising, I want to grow our customer base through advertising correctly and form a trusting relationship with our customer base. Be creative! Use your own company name, build your own customer base, quit trying to steal ours!