Greetings. I'm trademark attorney Josh Gerben, and I would like to talk a little bit about the difference between the principal and the supplemental register. The master and the supplemental register are the two registers that you could really end up on when you file a trademark awarding. Information technology is what it sounds like. You'd rather be on the principal annals.

The principal register is a annals that is reserved for the most unique trademarks. It basically says that once you have a registration on the principal register that you are the presumed owner of that trademark in all fifty states. So if you walk into a court of law and there is a lawsuit, you lot are the presumed owner. It is someone'due south duty in the lawsuit to have to rebut that presumption, and they would take to prove that for some reason you lot're non the owner. It's very hard to do that. So when you have a primary register registration, you're in actually practiced shape.

Now, how do you get on the main register? The one way y'all tin can do it is your trademark has to be unique. When I say "unique," it can exist a made-up word, like Kodak or Nike, or it tin can exist a word that'due south very common in the English language, only doesn't take a lot to exercise with your product, for case Apple tree for computers. The more your trademark describes your product or service, the less likely you're going to get on the principal annals, and this is why the supplemental annals exists. It's non that the supplemental annals is bad.

A lot of my clients end upwards on the supplemental register because they're using descriptive trademarks, and the reason that nosotros utilise trademarks that describe our goods or services is because for marketing purposes it works. And then what are some examples hither? Allow's say you wanted to have a sports nutrition line and you wanted to call it Super Nutrition. Well, using a laudatory word like super or not bad, those are non really unique trademarks. They're supplemental register material. So, sure, you can get a trademark on Super Nutrition, provided somebody else already hasn't, and get a registration, but the scope of protection is going to exist pretty narrow on that. I'll talk about that in a second. The other example that I would have is Sweetness Lollipops. Okay. So a lollipop is sweet. We know that, but that'southward your proper noun, Sweet Lollipops. Okay. That's a descriptive trademark.

So what does it hateful to be on the supplemental annals? Well, as opposed to the main annals, you lot exercise not have the presumption of federal ownership. This ways that if yous were to sue somebody, y'all would accept to prove that in the area you're suing them that people actually know of you, know of your product, or know of your service and would associate this trademark with your product or service. So information technology'south much harder to win a lawsuit from a trademark perspective if you merely have a supplemental register registration.

Now, let'southward talk about the benefits. The benefits of a supplemental registration are that you get to still use the circled R, so you lot have your trademark, and the circled R goes there when you go the registration. Everyone is going to know yous have a federally registered trademark. In addition, the government will all the same deny a trademark that is identical to yours or that may be very like. You're non going to get the same umbrella of protection that you would become if yous had a principal register registration, simply you're yet going to become protection from the authorities.

Then the other point every bit to why the supplemental registration is good is the deterrent that you lot get from having that registration. A lot of people, if you lot're using a trademark attorney or simply doing a search yourself, if they come up across your registration, they're going to say, "Hey, this person has a registration. Fifty-fifty though it's a pretty descriptive trademark, we don't want to go involved. We don't want to create a problem. So we'll go a different direction." So you still get the very expert value of having a deterrent of a trademark registration, even though you lot're on the supplemental register.

So it's not the end of the world, and, again, from a marketing perspective, a descriptive trademark may be meliorate for you lot than a trademark that's more unique, like a Nike or a Kodak or an Apple Calculator.