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To maintain a trademark and fight back infringement you have to repeatedly claim it by putting those annoying symbols after it. https://www.reddit.com/r/explai

• ryandrake 7y ago
  Then why doesn't Apple, who have some of the most valuable trademarks in existence, include a single (R) or TM in their (for example) iPhone marketing [1]? 1: https://www.apple.com/iphone-xr/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-xr/
  • burnte 7y ago
    Some lawyers are more conservative about what they should and should not do. Apple's lawyers put it all on one page: https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/appletmlist.html https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/... Other lawyers want it everywhere possible. It's not required to be everywhere, however, just sometimes. I have one customer who is a franchisee and their franchiser company demands the (R) everywhere because their MARKETER think it's "impressive" to people.
    • erichurkman 7y ago
      One old company of mine had an awful lawyer that even insisted on putting 'SM' everywhere while we were going through trademark applications. There are still dozens of permanent installations of their branding that show BLAHBLAH(sm). It looks awful and served no purpose.
    • pbreit 7y ago
      That's a much better reason than the legal one, imo.
  • crazygringo 7y ago
    Yes I think that's the real question being asked. Some companies put the TM and/or (R) everywhere, like every single mention of their product name on a single page. Others put it only at the first mention, or on a tiny corner of their logo. Yet others never put it anywhere. Are these just different lawyers' interpretations? Are they a conscious marketing decision to make a product/brand feel more official/important? Does it depend on how close to being genericized a trademark is (and therefore in danger of being lost)? Is there literally no rhyme or reason, people just blindly copying whatever they think is the "done thing" without actually knowing why? Is it all of these?
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      It's tryhard to make people think that the vendor is/has something special when it lacks brand awareness.
  • the_watcher 7y ago
    From the linked reddit post, a trademark attorney: > In many cases, you're right in that the TM or (R) is superfluous. No one, for example, is going to be able to argue they didn't know McDonald's or Coca Cola are trademarks for their respective companies, so whether those two are really marked with TM or (R) doesn't matter much. Mercedes isn't adding the symbol after "Mercedes-Benz", but after PRE-SAFE, which is not something a reasonable person would always associate with them.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • Silhouette 7y ago
    The point is that trademarks have to be meaningfully defended or they can be lost. Claiming something as a trademark or registered trademark, particularly something new that doesn't yet have a strong brand associated with it, is one possible element in establishing that defence. There are others. If you set up a new business selling mobile devices called iTelephones, it will probably not be long before you get contacted by Apple's lawyers, whether or not the term iPhone has an accompanying annotation on their promotional work.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• pbreit 7y ago
  Is that really true in practice, though? Are there any (ANY!) examples of the issue actually arising and not going in the owner's favor?
  • ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
    Having to claim it is true. Don't quite think that actually putting the symbol next to it does anything. But, for example, Velcro had this huge campain and spent a lot of money trying to curtail the use of the word "velcro" because they were afraid they'd lose their trademark.