In order for your patent protection to be effective, it must be the correct type of patent for the product. In our recent blog, we mentioned the case of ABPA v. Ford (2018), in which the Automotive Body Parts Association brought a case against Ford on the basis that headlamps are functional items, and therefore not applicable to a design patent. While Ford’s patent was upheld, and the patent remains, it’s a Read More

Trademarks are already known to be valuable to any business by providing protection over your brand from the likes of imitators, but many business owners fail to recognize their value in and of themselves. If your company is focused on growth, brand awareness, and expanding into new markets, your trademarks won’t just protect you, but propel your business forward - if you utilize them correctly. For instance, Read More

Your patents are your business - without them, your products lack the protections necessary to perform on the market. Just as important as the patents themselves is defending them. With even more businesses entering the market alongside the tech boom of new electric cars, there’s a lot to watch out for. We’ve seen an increase in patent litigation over the past few years in the automotive space, mainly driven by the Read More

Over the past few years, automotive manufacturers have slowly crept into the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual trade show previously exclusive to the consumer electronics industry. For good reason, automotive manufacturers have pushed into CES to show off the incredible new technology developing at a breakneck pace. This move comes not as a hostile takeover, but because the automotive industry has rightfully Read More

When selling aftermarket car parts, you undoubtedly want to sell as many of them as possible at the highest price point you can. Of course, since there are many other products out there, and a variety of different places where your parts will be sold, that is not always as easy as you would like. If you are targeting the higher end market with your parts, you will want to make sure that consumers always associate Read More

The USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) is not the only federal agency that needs to know about your intellectual property. After you send in a trademark application with the USPTO, you should register your brand identifiers with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).  The CBP does much more than enforce immigration laws—the agency also helps prevent infringing products from entering the U.S. through more than 300 Read More

China’s decades-long march toward a more capitalist economy has led more U.S.-based companies to consider offering products in the world’s largest country. This shift has surfaced a unique challenge for such retailers and manufacturers, which comes with China’s “first-to-file” trademark system. Unlike the U.S. and many other jurisdictions, which gives preference to the first entity to use a trademark in commerce, the Read More

Amazon has quickly become the leading marketplace in the world. Companies are seeing millions of their products being sold one unit at a time. No other single retailer can match that volume. Amazon also operates on a global scale, meaning most companies now have a larger reach - and their major competitors are now overseas. So what happens when another company makes a blatant rip-off of your product and starts Read More

Last month, we wrote about the Amazon Brand Registry again. The tool, which was created to protect trademarked products from knock-offs, has only recently begun to come into its own as a service that every Amazon seller should be paying attention to. It was created in response to criticism that Amazon is not doing enough to protect against counterfeits, and has just begun to live up to its purpose. Our previous Blog Read More

Back in May 2017, Amazon quietly unveiled their own Amazon Brand Registry. The program was created in response to frequent accusations from brands claiming that the marketplace website was not doing enough to protect against counterfeit and rip-off products. We wrote about the Brand Registry in October 2020 as it began to pick up steam, calling it a “new frontier.” Since then, it has become clear that not enough Read More