It’s the time of year again when the weather turns cold and thoughts turn to the Holidays — except that it’s raining outside and a balmy 58 degrees in New York. No, we’re not offering a holiday sale on trademark registrations, although they do make great gifts. Today we are thinking about our favorite subject — trademark mills — and what a disservice they do for unwitting clients. If you were fortunate to catch our latest video, then you caught my reference to trademark searches I ran on Trademarkia and another site for “MY GOOGLE” and “YAHOOO.” Both sites told me that these marks were available for registration and encouraged me to file an application right away. A video on You Tube shows users how to file a trademark application on Trademarkia in under five minutes — and to think that I’ve been wasting seven or eight hours on conducting clearance searches, ordering and reviewing search reports, and drafting clearance letters…
Lest my griping sound like sour grapes, I actually care what happens to clients when they are given the misleading impression that they can strip a complex, thought intensive process on which important business decisions are being made into a five minute exercise in filling out a form. Although my examples of YAHOOO and MY GOOGLE are extreme, because most people wouldn’t think that they could use those marks, they are intended to show exactly how useless and harmful at the same time the “do-it-yourself” search window on the trademark mill sites can be. The lack of transparency and any semblance of legal advice makes these services dangerous. Clients are effectively blindly guessing, but leave with the impression that they’ve done a search and can rely on the results. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place in the world for an automated trademark filing service, but the risks and the tradeoffs should be disclosed up-front, so that clients know what the potential consequences of not using an actual trademark attorney are.
