Trademark or Service Mark

Unlike Patent Law, trademarks are not covered by the United States Constitution. Some would argue this was a big omission by our founding fathers. The concept of a trademark is a very old one, and has to do with how you can distinguish goods as being from one source, and not another. Think about if you were going to a market hundreds of years ago and you wanted to know who made an overcoat, with one particular coat maker having a reputation for quality. The quality coat maker would like to, effectively, put a label in the coats produced so that potential buyers would be able to discriminate about who the coat maker was in making a purchasing decision.

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used to show the source of the goods. The presence of a trademark is reflected by the symbol ®. A trademark is sought through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is covered in Title 15 of the United States Code. Once granted the trademark, the owner of the trademark has a variety of rights, and they include preventing others from using a confusingly similar mark.

A service mark is very much like a trademark. The main difference is that the service mark pertains to the source of the service rather than the good.