3 Brands to Avoid When Choosing A Trademark

Here are three brands to avoid when you're branding your company or looking to file a trademark. I'm going to spend the next three minutes talking about this. I'm Angela Langlotz, trademark and copyright attorney and I go live here on weekdays to talk trademarks and copyrights. There are some companies out there that are very, very aggressive in asserting their trademark rights. And I want to talk about three that come to mind right here. Now, there may be others. This certainly isn't an exhaustive list, but I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago because one of my clients was having an issue with one of these brands.

So I thought I would make this video and let everyone know that there are certain brands that are very aggressive about enforcing their trademark rights for anything that's related to their goods. And so you should avoid the use of these marks, because if you don't, you will eventually hear from them and they won't be nice about it. So brand number one is ENTREPRENEUR. Now, entrepreneur makes a they publish a business magazine and they they have a number of other goods and services that they offer.

If you register a trademark or attempt to register a trademark for anything business-related and you want to use the word entrepreneur, you're probably going to have a hard time getting that registered. Why? Because as soon as Entrepreneur magazine catches wind of this, they will immediately oppose your trademark and send you a cease and desist letter. And they have lots of money to litigate. So you probably won't want to wrangle with them because you'll likely lose. And even if you don't lose, you may win, but you'll end up poor.

And that's no fun. So what is number two? Number two is LUSH. Now, Lush is a cosmetics company. And if you try to register a trademark for anything containing the word lush, you will hear from them. So they will send you a cease and desist letter. They will oppose your trademark if you don't abandon it. And they will just generally cause problems with you, for you, I mean, with anything that's cosmetic-related. The third one is the UT Austin.

Anything that's related to this, "hook them horns" trademark. They will go after you for that. So don't try to register any logos that have the Shaka symbol or anything like that. They will come after you. They've got tons of money -- and it's not even their own money. It's the taxpayers money. They will come after you and tell you to cease and desist the use of their Shaka trademark. And it actually is this hook them horns thing actually is registered as a trademark, which is kind of weird that you can register that as a trademark.

But as I like to say, you can register anything as a trademark. So those are three that just came to mind that are good to stay away from. Like, don't play around the edges, don't try to be cute, just don't use them. Just stay away from them. That's my best advice. I'm Angela Langlotz. I practice trademark and copyright law and I go live here on weekdays to talk about trademarks and copyrights. I hope you get some benefit from these videos.

Please feel free to like, share, and subscribe. You can find me on YouTube at video dot TrademarkDoctor.net forward slash YouTube. I'm online TrademarkDoctor.net and you can find me on Facebook at Facebook dot com forward slash TrademarkDoctor.net. If you have trademark law questions, drop them in the comments below. I'll answer them on a future live video.