undefinedWhat is the name of your state? North Carolina
Partners and I have a software company that we named SoftForYou and we applied for a stylized trademark last August. At the time we did a bit of searching ourselves and did not believe we would be turned down. To our dismay they refused us on the grounds of another software company located in Germany called Software4U.
We do our business online and our website is our storefront.
Since we have worked hard for 3 years to bring our name to the market, are registered with city and county, have had our company and its internet filter reviewed/ads placed in major magazines like PC magazine and Computer Shopper, have a reseller agreement with some folks in one other country with one or two more pending and etc, etc, we wonder if it wouldn't be best to simply continue as we have been but without the trademark registered.
Also, when they turned us down, they said our sample of how we use our name in commerce was unacceptable, because it was on an invoice. Yet they accept labels - which we do not have. None of this made any sense to me. The connection between sending a sample of how we stylize our name and use it, versus the simple fact of the name itself - our company - is not clear to me. Other than our website itself, which has the stylized form of our company name as a logo in large display, we do not have any other commercial samples that the lawyer said were acceptable and which were also in use at the time of our filing.
We had intended to trademark the name of the internet filter software itself, but are unsure if it's possible to do on our own (do an adequate search). Nor do we want to change its name at this point. The name of our product (iProtectYou) is even more important than the name of our company.
Thanks
Partners and I have a software company that we named SoftForYou and we applied for a stylized trademark last August. At the time we did a bit of searching ourselves and did not believe we would be turned down. To our dismay they refused us on the grounds of another software company located in Germany called Software4U.
We do our business online and our website is our storefront.
Since we have worked hard for 3 years to bring our name to the market, are registered with city and county, have had our company and its internet filter reviewed/ads placed in major magazines like PC magazine and Computer Shopper, have a reseller agreement with some folks in one other country with one or two more pending and etc, etc, we wonder if it wouldn't be best to simply continue as we have been but without the trademark registered.
Also, when they turned us down, they said our sample of how we use our name in commerce was unacceptable, because it was on an invoice. Yet they accept labels - which we do not have. None of this made any sense to me. The connection between sending a sample of how we stylize our name and use it, versus the simple fact of the name itself - our company - is not clear to me. Other than our website itself, which has the stylized form of our company name as a logo in large display, we do not have any other commercial samples that the lawyer said were acceptable and which were also in use at the time of our filing.
We had intended to trademark the name of the internet filter software itself, but are unsure if it's possible to do on our own (do an adequate search). Nor do we want to change its name at this point. The name of our product (iProtectYou) is even more important than the name of our company.
Thanks