One of the main benefits of federal trademark registration is national coverage.
Once your registration issues, you are presumed to be the exclusive, nationwide, user of your trademark in connection with the goods and services listed on your registration. By illustration, this gives a Seattle owner the right to sue someone in Miami who adopted a confusingly similar mark after the date the Seattle owner applied to register its mark.
That’s right — the rights that flow from a trademark registration relate back to the date a trademark owner files its application for federal registration. That’s the day the world is legally put on notice that the registrant sought to claim national rights in its mark.
Here’s how conflicting trademark rights commonly sort out.
If you sell branded product in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, you have automatic common law rights in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland. That means you can go after copycats in those markets who adopt a name that would likely confuse consumers into believing they are you, are authorized by you, or have some association with you.
But what about the rest of the country? Let’s say the brand owner is called ABC123, and it operates restaurants under that name in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland. Can it do anything about a new restaurant that opens in San Francisco that is also called ABC123 (or a confusingly similar variant, like ABC124)?
Not without a federal trademark registration. Without obtaining national rights that a registration provides, the restaurant owner probably wouldn’t have any trademark rights in San Francisco available to enforce. In other words, without regularly making sales there, the brand owner probably wouldn’t have any legal basis to complain. That’s why a federal registration is valuable — it gives the trademark owner the legal basis to complain about any conflicting trademark use, anywhere in the United States.
What if there’s another restaurant called ABC123 in Miami that was open at the time the owner of the Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland restaurants applied to register its mark? As long as a registration issues, the Miami owner would locked into the geographic area in which it had been making sales (in this case, Miami) that existed at the time the owner of the Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland restaurants filed its application. This means the Miami owner would have superior trademark rights in Miami, and the Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland owner would have superior rights everywhere else. In this way, a registration whitewashes the map of the United States, giving the registrant superior trademark rights everywhere except for the local areas in which competing users had rights at the time the registrant filed its application.
This usually is the most valuable right a federal trademark registration provides. It can give the brand owner a powerful advantage over its competitors.