Can I Register A Company Name Of An Inactive Company

Trademarks are alive—they grow, they change, and sometimes they dice.

Trademarks are unlike other forms of intellectual property. While patents and copyrights have divers boundaries and rigid time limits, trademarks are defined by use. The protections provided past a trademark extend equally long as it is in use—potentially forever. And like any living thing, trademarks crave care and maintenance to stay alive.

When a forgotten trademark stops being used, you lot tin can't simply use it as your own. Instead, you tin can fill the spot the expired trademark vacated with a brand new trademark that protects exactly what yous need.

designer measuring patterns in her studio

What Does It Hateful When a Trademark Is Abased?

To understand trademark abandonment, you need to sympathize trademark maintenance. Federal trademarks, for instance, require periodic reports and fees. Those reports ensure that the trademark in use is still the 1 for which the owner originally filed protection. If your trademark changes, or if your product changes, it will be reflected in your reports to the federal government. You may need to better, alter, or outright refile your trademark. A trademark that has outgrown or shifted from its original product has the potential to go abased.

Keep in mind that the trademark protects the relationship between your products and your customers, ensuring that your customers place you as the source of those goods. Your trademark is literally the brand yous put on your product that says you provided it. Think of the maintenance process as ensuring that the brand means the aforementioned matter to your customers. That relationship can change over time. The trademark and the product can abound together, can grow apart, and sometimes the trademark can dice.

Trademark maintenance requires both reports and fees. You can explicitly abandon the trademark by filing the right paperwork at the trademark office, which ways intentionally putting down what was once your intellectual property. Alternatively, you can simply end maintaining your trademark and allow the trademark office tell you that your trademark is abandoned.

How Do I Register an Abased Trademark?

You can't simply register an abased trademark. The trademark every bit it once existed is at present expressionless. Where it once stood there is now an open up infinite. In the past, the existing trademark prevented competitors from using the same kind of trademark. Those rights are now gone, creating an opportunity to create something similar, even related, but ultimately new. The relationship between your customers and your product volition never be exactly the same as the relationship between the original marking holder and the original product. You cannot just plug the one-time mark into your new business and await the aforementioned result. The application you file volition non be exactly the same.

What your new awarding can do is borrow the now dead trademark. No one can sue you for creating a new and similar trademark. Trademark infringement does not require the use of an identical marking—merely one that'south close enough to make customers think goods or services come from the same source.

Rather than re-animate its corpse, yous are creating a new, living, breathing relationship with your customers. Protect that new relationship with a new trademark and fill the gap left by the dead trademark. In the end, it is style amend than but re-filing the old trademark; replace it with a trademark that fits your business.

Trademark abandonment seems simple but really requires a sophisticated understanding of what trademarks are, what they protect, and where they end. Once you know that, information technology's easy to find a expressionless trademark and supervene upon it with a new, living, and animate trademark.