12. Trademark resources

If you’re interested in protecting your trademark or service mark, you may want to consult these Nolo resources:

• Trademark: Legal Care for Your Business & Product Name, by Stephen Elias, shows how to choose a distinctive name, conduct a trademark search, register a mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and protect the mark once it’s in use.

A detailed description of Nolo resources is provided in the Introduction, Section C. (Order information is at the back of this book, or visit www.nolo.com.)

The Internet offers convenient access to an enormous amount of trademark materials, including:

• the federal trademark statutes and regulations

• informative articles by trademark experts

• the federal trademark database (for a reasonable fee), and

• recent changes in PTO trademark examination procedures.

Here is a brief list of sites that will either have the information you are looking for or will provide you with links to other sites that do.

• Nolo (www.nolo.com) offers self-help information about a wide variety of legal topics, including trademark law (See the Intellectual Property topic in the Legal Encyclopedia, which incidentally includes selected entries from this part of the book).

• Findlaw (www.findlaw.com) offers an excellent collection of trademark-related materials on the Web, including trademark statutes, regulations, classification manuals and articles of general interest. Click the intellectual property link in the topics section on the Findlaw homepage and then click trademark in the subcategory section on the intellectual property page.

• Marksonline (www.marksonline.com) provides trademark searching services, news, and links as well as domain name information. It’s easy to navigate, contains lots of practical information for trademark owners and includes links to state and federal trademark offices.

• U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) is the place to go for recent policy and statutory changes and transcripts of hearings on various trademark law issues. This site also offers three useful online programs: TESS, TEAS and TARR. TESS is a searchable database of federally registered trademarks, TARR provides information on the status of pending registrations and TEAS (including PrinTEAS and eTEAS) is a system for electronic filing of trademark registrations.

• International Trademark Association (INTA) (www.inta.org) provides trademark services, publications and online resources.