Concept: Trademark infringement

Introduced by SB Master, Founder & CEO of Naming Matters, sb@namingmatters.com.

About Naming Matters

Being sued for trademark infringement is a serious problem, and selecting names is thus, risky business. Trademark infringement is a product of similarity of name combined with similarly of goods or services; the more similar your proposed name and goods are to someone else’s, the riskier that name. Our current product addresses Registered trademarks. But in many countries, users are able to build “Common Law” rights to names merely through use, without ever registering anywhere as a trademark. Our challenge here is to find these Common Law uses of the names are users are considering. We need to identify both identical names, and phonetically similar names. Ideally, we will be able to find these uses, and also provide some information on what the name is being used for. This could include a “clip” or excerpt showing how the name is being used in text, or something more definitive such as an industry classification. We expect the richest places to look for name use would be big datasets such as the archives of major newspapers and business publications; business announcement services such as PR Newswire; and industry-specific publications.