About the Jewish Lawyer
Jeremy Peter Green Eche is a branding attorney and the founder of JPG Legal and Communer, a marketplace for registered trademarks. He is the attorney of record for over 3,000 U.S. trademark registrations. In 2019, JPG Legal was ranked the #16 law firm in the United States by number of federal trademark applications filed. Eche graduated from Northwestern University School of Law on a full scholarship. Thomson Reuters selected him as a Super Lawyers Rising Star in Intellectual Property for 2021.
Eche has been profiled on USA Today, CNBC, CNN Money, NPR's Morning Edition, WIRED, MSNBC, Forbes, the New York Daily News, HLN, CNN Politics, DCist, ABA Journal, Vox.com, CNET, Mic.com, NBC News, Refinery29, the Globe and Mail, and several other news sources. Before becoming a trademark attorney, he was known for owning ClintonKaine.com and hosting his comics there during the 2016 election, before selling the domain.
Eche is based in Brooklyn in New York City. He formerly served as in-house General Counsel for Teamsters Local 922 in Washington, DC. Eche is married to Stephanie Eche, an artist and creative consultant who co-founded Communer with him. He has moderate Tourette syndrome.
You can contact him at info@jpglegal.com.
Should I Trademark My Amazon Brand?
What is the Amazon Brand Registry?
Disclaimer: This post arguably constitutes legal advice and in a way I am your lawyer now. At the end of this post, I will no longer be your lawyer, unless I already was before.
Amazon has recently changed its standards for becoming a member of their Brand Registry, which is the main resource Amazon sellers have for stopping people who counterfeit and infringe on their brands. In part because of these changes, I’ve been getting so many clients who sell on Amazon in the past few months that I’ve decided to make it a major part of my trademark filing practice.
Unfortunately, Amazon has made it much harder to get on their Brand Registry and stop other sellers from stealing your brand name. The roughest thing about it is that Amazon only seems to recognize trademarks that are fully registered, and not ones that are still in the process of being registered. The smallest amount of time you can hope for between filing of the application and registration of the trademark is eight months, and that’s when everything goes right.
Further, Amazon isn’t accepting logos and stylized trademarks. (Nov 7 2017 UPDATE: Amazon has loosened its requirements and now also accepts stylized words as well as logos as long as they have the wording of the brand name in them.) According to Amazon, “the Mark Drawing Type must be equal to ‘4 – STANDARD CHARACTER MARK’ or ‘1 – TYPESET WORD(S)/LETTER(S)/NUMBER(S).” So anybody who has a registered logo trademark, even if the logo has the name of the brand in it, is ineligible for the Brand Registry.
Is it worth going through the whole trademarking process?
It’s definitely worth it for Amazon sellers to file trademark applications for their brands. Having the power to kick counterfeiters and infringers off of Amazon is massive, and arguably essential, for an Amazon seller. I’ve even had a couple of clients who are in the unfortunate position of having to fight a counterfeiter or brand infringer who filed a USPTO trademark application before the legitimate seller filed their own. Now they are mired in long-term legal struggles just to have the right to use their own brand name.
Even without the Amazon Brand Registry, trademarking your brand name is essential.
Registering a trademark in the U.S. (and getting a legal opinion on your brand name from a U.S. trademark attorney) should be a priority for any business that sells products to U.S. consumers, regardless of whether they sell goods on Amazon. The following benefits justify the cost of securing any ecommerce/retail company’s U.S. trademark rights:
1. You eliminate the risk of somebody else filing a U.S. trademark application for your name or a similar name in your industry before you do, a problem that would severely limit, if not destroy, your ability to sell products to U.S. consumers. You would also likely be booted from the U.S. Amazon Brand Registry, even if you have a registered trademark in a different country.
2. You are more likely to avoid receiving a cease-and-desist letter out of the blue from an existing company with a similar name, pressuring you to lawyer up and possibly forcing you to change your brand name.
3. It makes your company more valuable as an asset if you’re interested in selling the company and exiting with a large payout.
4. Retail stores prefer to work with companies that have strong trademark rights established. Costco, for instance, insisted that a liquor company I worked with give Costco evidence that their trademark rights were in order before their product could go on shelves.
5. Having a U.S. trademark registration is the closest thing to owning an “international trademark” that a company can achieve; the United States is the world’s great cultural and economic hegemonic power.
Just get your trademark rights in order already.
So yes, if you sell products on Amazon, you should trademark your brand. The sooner a seller files an application, the better, before a Chinese-owned LLC registered in Wyoming files one first. I’m biased, but I recommend hiring JPG Legal (my law firm), using our online form, to do this.
Click Here to Learn More About Our
Trademark Registration Packages.
Follow Jeremy on Twitter.
Related Posts:
Forbes Names JPG Legal a Top Trademark Filing Service
Scalable Vs. Non-Scalable Business: A Comparison
USPTO ID.me Verification for Trademark Filings: What Is This?
Trademark Renewal Timeline: How Often Do You Have To Renew?
Client Spotlight: Juhn Hits 500 Million Streams for One Song
Software Trademark Guide: Classes and Specimens
Legal Mistakes Every Startup Company Should Avoid Making
An Affordable Trademark Attorney
Leveraging Social Media To Elevate Your Business Strategy
How To Attract More Customers to Your Business
Protecting Your Business 101: Lawsuits, Cybercrimes, and More
How To Reinvent and Reinvigorate Your Hiring Strategy
What a Startup Needs To Be Successful
Valuing a Trademark: How Much Is A Trademark Worth?
How to Come up with a Brand Name: A Lawyer’s Advice
Amazon Brand Registry Now Accepts Pending Trademark Applications
Our Law Firm’s Favorite Work-From-Home Gear
Recession Business Good, Sticky Business Better
Our March 2020 Weekly Revenue Numbers Show When Businesses Started Freaking out Around the World
March 2020 Update on JPG Legal
Trademarking a Band or Musician Name: Goods/Services IDs
Can Flavor Flav Sue The Sanders Campaign For Promoting a “Public Enemy” Performance?
New York’s New Broker Fee Rule: Can You Get Your Broker Fee Back?
Why We Raised Some of Our Fees
The New USPTO Rule: What Do Foreign Trademark Applicants Need to Do With Their Existing Trademarks?
How Early Should You Form Your LLC?
Amazon’s Project Zero Means Getting a Trademark Is Now More Important Than Ever
JPG Legal Update: New Attorney, New Space in Dumbo
JPG Legal Is Hiring Its First Associate Attorney
Mid-2018 Update on JPG Legal’s Growth
MoMA v. MoMaCha: a Trademark Attorney’s Perspective
MarkHound and the Move to Manhattan
The Evolution of JPG Legal as a Website and as a Law Firm
The Future of the Trademark Business Model
Trademark Websites Are Lying About the Amazon Brand Registry
Are Negligence and Recklessness the Same Thing?
Can a Restraining Order Affect Your Security Clearance?
Can Filing a Restraining Order Against Somebody Affect Your Security Clearance?
Why Are Dead Presidents the Only Dead People with Trademark Protections?