Question
We would like to protect our brand as a registered trademark. We have been using our company name as the brand for our main product, so we were wondering if in the beginning it would be enough to register only that as a trademark and keep costs down.
In case we develop a spin-off service the marketing of which would be independent of the main product, we would probably use a different brand though. We were wondering if the protection we would have for the main brand could be somehow expanded onto other products without us having to register for each brand individually. As an example, let's say our main product and our company was called "Rocketize" and we had a trademark registered. Could we for instance brand a product with "Rocketize Pro", "Rocketize Enterprise", "New Rocketize", "Rocketizer" and so on and still have these brands protected under the original registration?
Answers: 3 public & 0 private
A registration of your main trademark/trade name will likely protect any variation use of the name as you reference as long as the new products are in the same class as the original registered mark. I would recommend that you put a circle R after the "Rocketize" name with an attribution statement on the packaging identifying the name as your registered trademark.
If you go outside the U.S., you may find jurisdictions where you may have more difficulty defending the variations especially without a history of usage in the country.
The brands/trade names you posed would not necessarily be protected under your main TM registration ROCKETIZE but you could probably get away with such since, if someone else used, for example, NEW ROCKETIZE, there would be a likelihood of confusion in that the public would naturally assume that NEW ROCKETIZE was associated with your company. Think of any of the well-known brands/trademarks - what if someone started using NEW McDONALDS - the public would naturally assume that it was related to McDOANLDS and that maybe they were starting to market a new "type" of restaurant. The best way to proceed would to begin using your brand/mark variations as soon as possible, since TM rights originate with use, and to then proceed with registrations as soon as possible.
No, every spin-off of the mother brand will be treated as an individual trademark by the PTO's.
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