Different Types Of Trademarks
The term trademark stands for certain symbols or texts that differentiate the products of one company from the other. The basic objective of trademarks is to ensure that people can buy the correct products without being influenced by the spurious or counterfeited ones.
One of the key requirements for a trademark is that it should be different, which means it should be exclusive and identifiable. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its slotting into one of the trademark groups - descriptive, fanciful, suggestive, and generic.
A descriptive mark uses a specific characteristic or quality of a product to separate it from other products of its kind. Although a few descriptive marks that have acquired a secondary meaning in the marketplace, which the consumers can recognize as originating from a particular source, can be trademarked, this is not the usual case as descriptive marks are rarely exclusive.
Suggestive marks, as is evident by the name, suggest an essential feature of the product. However, it is mostly the case that the mark and the product do not show any obvious relation and the customers might need to guess the connection between the two. For instance, footwear named 'Hush Puppies' are suggestive of cosy shoes, which make sure that your feet do not become sore. The creative reason behind such a name is that the problem of sore feet is loosely referred to as 'barking dogs' in certain American states.
On the other hand, arbitrary marks are those that are not linked to the commodity. For example, there is no justifiable link between the symbol of a half eaten apple and the product name 'Apple' to the computer manufacturer. Arbitrary marks are those that do not have any usage in existing languages and have come from the imagination of the manufacturer, like 'Exxon'.
Lastly generic marks are those that represent a general category of the item like 'olive oil', and they do not come under the purview of trademark laws.
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