

This would protect your trademark in your symbol regardless of the way it is displayed.

Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS) or other online trademark service. You can register a trademark for a symbol online using the U.S. If you submitted your logo, you have a trademark for the overall logo, but that may not be sufficient to protect you from unauthorized use of the symbol by itself. So, if you submitted your symbol, you have a registered trademark for the symbol-but not for your logo as a whole.
R TRADEMARK SYMBOL KEYBOARD REGISTRATION
When you trademark a symbol or logo, your trademark registration only covers the exact image that you submitted with your registration. Many business logos include a symbol as part of the logo. The less unique your symbol is, the more likely that you will have to show that your symbol has acquired a “secondary meaning,” which means that when people see your symbol, they automatically think of your goods or services. Therefore, an unusual symbol that you make up will be easiest to register, and a symbol that is nothing more than a common punctuation mark is so generic that it cannot be registered. The more unique your symbol, the greater its trademark protection and the easier it will be to register a trademark. Trademark protection is only available for symbols that are distinctive enough to set your business apart from other businesses. This means that the symbol cannot be similar to another trademark that identifies a related good or service.Ĭan Your Symbol Be Registered as a Trademark? The symbol cannot be confusingly similar to another registered trademark or pending trademark application.However, you might be able to register a trademark for these types of symbols if they have additional design elements. The symbol must be distinctive: It cannot be just a letter, number, punctuation mark or other commonly used symbol.Those symbols may, however, be protected by a copyright. You cannot trademark a symbol that you only use for personal purposes or that you use only as part of an item that you sell, such as a symbol printed on a t-shirt. You must use the symbol to identify your goods and services, such as using the symbol in your company logo.For example, Nike’s “swoosh” symbol is a registered trademark. You can obtain trademark protection for a symbol that you use to distinguish your business’s goods or services from those of other businesses.
