Trademark Registration

When your trademark is federally registered with the USPTO it is protected throughout the United States, not just in one state. This is extremely useful when enforcing your trademark rights on the Internet.

Federal trademark registration provides nationwide constructive notice to others that the registered trademark is owned by you. If your trademark is infringed, the infringer can not defend his conduct by arguing he did not know about your trademark.
Also, when federally registered, your trademark will be published in the USPTO database. This helps prevent your competitors from adopting confusingly similar trademarks.

When you federally register your trademark, you may be able to recover three times your actual damages from the trademark infringer. This is called “treble damages”.
You may also be able to recover any profits that the defendant earned while infringing your trademark. These are serious economic penalties you can use against trademark infringers, but they are only available if you federally register your trademark.

Attorney fees add up fast, especially during litigation. If you have to sue a trademark infringer, you may be entitled to recover attorney fees, but only if your trademark is federally registered.

After five years, federally registered trademarks become “incontestable”. When this happens, your exclusive right to use the trademark is conclusively established, making it extremely difficult for another party to challenge your trademark.

Website Owners: Important Benefits of Federal Trademark Registration for Internet Businesses

Has anyone ever registered a typo of your domain name? Or is a competitor using a confusingly similar domain name? If it has not happened already, it probably will. And when it does, you’ll find yourself in a domain name dispute.
To win a domain name dispute, the first thing you’ll have to prove is that you have trademark rights. And the easiest way to prove that you have rights in a trademark is by showing you have federally registered the trademark.

For this reason, federal trademark registration is super important in winning domain name disputes.

Is a competitor bidding on your trademarks in the pay-per-click search engines? What about using your trademark in Google Adwords advertisements?
Each search engine has a trademark policy for dealing with these problems. But if you want to complain to a search engine, you’ll have to prove to the search engine that you have trademark rights, and by far the easiest way to do that is by showing that your trademark is federally registered.