Currently browsing: Trademark

Amazon Merch on Demand – Understanding Trademark and Copyright

merch trademark and copyright

In your quest to deliver quality designs to the print on demand market, you may have come across designs that you want to use but are unsure of using them because they are made by someone else. This is a good way of looking at it as your original ideas will always be yours without conflict. But sometimes we deliver products based on the work of others and it all falls into a grey area of what is permitted and what is clearly not. One of the worst aspects of being a print on demand seller is losing your Merch By Amazon account due to trademark breaches, and the tough part is that comprehending trademarks and copyrights can be very […]

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Avoiding Trademark Claims With Merch Informer’s Trademark Tool

avoiding trademarks

You may have woken up one morning with a great idea for a t-shirt to sell on Merch by Amazon. You’ve got the design and the catch phrase. You’ve even got the colors and sizing in mind. It’s only a matter of uploading the design and watching the sales come rolling in, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. This is because you’ve missed out one very important – perhaps the most crucial – piece of the puzzle. Checking trademark registrations. Don’t worry, this won’t take as much time as you fear. With Merch Informer’s Trademarks module, you can easily check trademarks and stay safe. Ready to find out how it works? Let’s dive in. What Are Trademarks […]

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USPTO Merch by Amazon Trademark Tutorial Guide

Remember the good old days when you could put up any shirt or phrase without having any idea if something in your bullets or title was trademarked and it went through anyway? I do! We have been selling on the Merch platform since almost the beginning so we have seen a lot of changes with the way they do things, and the way that they enforce intellectual properly. I also clearly remember the days when Amazon started taking this more seriously as the platform grew, which means that I had to learn REAL QUICK on how to use the governments website to look up trademarks and figure out how to avoid phrases that may cause Amazon issues. You see, even […]

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Introducing The Trademark Hunter – New Merch Informer Module

One of the biggest issues today in the Merch by Amazon space is the ability to monitor your listings for Trademarks. When you have just a few listings, it can be incredibly easy to go in every week and take a look at your listing data to make sure you are not infringing on any intellectual property of another person or business. When you start to fill out your slots though, this becomes more and more difficult. Often times, your listings will remain compliant for months if not years. Then… one day you get a take down notice from Amazon because something in your listing has become trademarked that wasn’t before! Merch Informer set out to fix this issue, and […]

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How To File Letters Of Protest Against Frivolous Trademarks

The trademark industry is OUT OF CONTROL. As Print on Demand sellers, we hear about this every single day. Someone has trademarked a new phrase, and is using their phrase to take down everyone’s products on Merch, Redbubble, Etsy, you name it! A while back, our good friend Ken Reil found a FREE way to combat these trademark trolls as they tried to register more common phrases and words for their own benefit. Letters of Protest can be filed for free, quickly and easily, which will alert the USPTO attorneys that their may be some evidence out there that the trademark should NOT be granted. It soon became clear that these are working! Since this issue is so incredibly important, […]

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How To Trademark A T-shirt Slogan – Step By Step Guide

Today we are featuring a guest post on the Merch Informer blog from Heather A. Sapp, the Senior Trademark Attorney at LegalForce RAPC. We met around a month ago and she has since been nothing but helpful with an abundance of knowledge on copyright and trademark in the POD space. We have invited her to write about the steps you may want to consider to protect some of your best selling t-shirts! The proliferation of print-on-demand t-shirt services such as Merch by Amazon, CafePress, and Zazzle means that anyone with an internet connection can be a fashion designer. But with this ease also comes the risk that someone will copy your design and post it on a different site. Or even […]

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