1.3 How important are trademarks to society?

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From the course by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Protecting Business Innovations via Trademark

24 ratings

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Protecting Business Innovations via Trademark

24 ratings

Protecting Business Innovations Via Trademark Watch Course Overview: https://youtu.be/mUja4iwbrTE Intellectual property rights (IPR) has a great impact on innovation development and society. In Science, Engineering, and Business, we seek to create wealth through innovation in products, designs, manufacturing processes, and business systems or models. However, innovation leaders often FAIL to benefit from their discoveries and inventions when they are unable to adequately protect those innovations. This course provides learners with an understanding of how trademark laws can be used to protect business innovation using a combination of lectures and case examples for discussion. The course focus on protecting innovations with Trademark as one of several tools that can be used by companies to protect their brands and products. In additional to learning about how trademark law works in theory, we will also discuss situations in which trademark might not be effective in protecting innovations, and will focus on the legal issues involved from a practical business perspective rather than from a purely legal viewpoint. This course is one part of a four course series focusing on protection of business innovations using copyright, patent, trademark and strategy, and these four courses may be taken in any order that is most beneficial to students interested in learning about protecting innovation.

From the lesson

Introduction to Trademark

Welcome to this course on Protecting Business Innovations via Trademark! How do companies protect their intellectual property, creative innovations and protect their brands from being copied? Over the next three weeks you will gain insight on how companies protect their brands & trademark through trademark law, registration, lawsuit and acquisition. As you go through the materials, you may have your own trademark related questions or scenarios that pop-up, feel free to post them in the discussion forum. Take some time to review the assignments, grading and general course guidelines for this course. Week 1 will cover the basics of trademark law and why local brands sometimes can beat international well–known brands with the same trademarks.

1.2 Why is trademark important to business?7:44

1.3 How important are trademarks to society?9:57

1.4 What can be protected by trademark?6:14

Meet the Instructors

Theodore Henry King CLARK
Associate Professor
Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management Department

In our last session, we talked about the importance of trademark, and

we focused on why trademark matters to companies.

Why it's valuable, why you want to protect it?

In this session, we're going to take a different approach and ask,

why is it important to governments, or why is it important to society?

Why do we have trademarks?

If we go back to the original idea of trademarks when they were initially

created, the idea of a trademark was to protect craftsman,

protect people creating things.

And it was a mark on a good used in commerce,

a mark used on your artistic product.

A Steinway piano has a mark on it that says Steinway.

A plate might have Wedgwood China on it, or

some other mark that says, this is my product.

You could think of it like a brand,

like you would brand a cow in a cattle in a Western movie.

That's my mark.

And it's a physical mark that you put on a product used in trade.

So it's a trademark.

It only had meaning for a product.

Because otherwise, it wasn't a mark on a product used in trade, which means sales.

So it was a mark used in selling something.

But it's become broader than that,

and it's now protecting the corporate identity, logos, brands in general.

If we think about today, what are we protecting with intellectual property?

We're protecting artistic expression with copyright.

We're protecting inventions with patent, and we're protecting brands and identity,

logos, sounds, and many other things with our trademark.

And that's what we're using trademark for.

But it's more than just products today.

There are other kinds of marks, which are also called trademarks, but

they're not marks on a good used in trade.

They're marks on service, for example.

When you go to a Prudential financial advisor, and

you get an insurance product, they'll say, buy a piece of the rock.

That's the slogan they use.

You're not actually getting a rock.

You're just getting solid financial advice.

That's the idea.

So when you buy, get a Visa card issued by your local bank,

the Visa logo on there is a service that

the company is providing of processing and representing that.

And Visa is a corporation, Marriott is selling services.

There's also collective marks.

And collective marks are a group of companies with commonality of ownership or

franchise agreements.

The Triple A insurance companies may have separate owners,

but they're part of the Triple A group.

They may be independently operated from state to state, but

from the consumer point of view,

you feel like it's all Triple A, and they're part of the same group.

LASIK eye care, each one of these maybe an independently-owned center, but

they're providing the same technology and service.

Certification marks are even a little more abstract.

So we're moving from product to service to collectives to a certification, like CPA.

That's protected by trademark law.

It's not a corporation, although there is a company that licenses CPAs and

approves them and makes the certification.

But it's more of an association that says if you do these things,

we certify that you are a qualified CPA.

If you have a product that meets certain specs,

we allow you to use the Woolmark mark that says your product is 100% wool.

That's all you have to do, and then you can say Woolmark.

Or ISO 1000, meet these criteria, and

you can have the ISO logo on your company literature.

In terms of value to society,

trademark is one of the least tangible of the intangible assets.

Copyright and patent are easier to understand

in terms of their value to society and value to society worldwide.

186 governments have said, we value copyright.

We're going to join in international treaties and agreements to recognize and

honor each others copyrights.

Patent is much more of a local law phenomena.

And there are many, many countries that recognize patents.

A few with less than copyright, but

it's still pretty well-globally recognized that we want to encourage innovation.

And so we recognize patents.

Trademark is harder to sell to some governments as to its value.

Some government say, absolutely, this is really valuable.

We really need it.

We need to protect it.

We need to protect consumers, we need to protect corporations,

we honor value trademark and the government say?

Why?

Why do we care?

And if they say that, you get small judgements, you get weak governmental

protections, and therefore, your trademark is not worth as much to your business.

So if it's not valuable to society, the governments won't protect it.

Judges won't give awards, big awards, and you make less money as a corporation.

So you want your trademark to be valuable to society.

That means you have to sell the idea of trademark

as having value to consumers in society.

Now, if we look at the value in US and Europe, it's pretty high.

And in fact, violating trademark can be very expensive.

There's a discount shoe store that sells their own

brand of shoes called Payless in New York.

It's very popular store.

They came out with a shoe that have three stripes on it that made it look like

an Adidas shoe.

And Adidas sued.

Now, Payless said nobody thought it was an Adidas shoe.

It's a Payless shoe, it's our brand.

But the court said, no, it looks too close.

It's likely to create confusion in consumer's minds.

It's too much of an overlap.

We find Payless is at fault for violating trademark law.

So what did Payless have to do?

Well, they got to pay a lot of money.

How much money?

Well, frst, they have to pay the damages that they caused to Adidas, 30 million.

That's the first part of the judgment.

Adidas gets the money that they lost.

But then, Payless also has to pay to Adidas

all the money Payless made on this shoe.

Payless sells many more shoes than Adidas does.

For one thing, they're cheaper.

But so, Payless has to pay out all of their profits to Adidas

in addition to all of Adidas's loss.

The court is saying Adidas should be made whole, and Payless should be made whole.

And Payless being made whole means take away any profits they made,

give it to Adidas.

In addition, the judge said, we find this offensive and upsetting.

So we're going to award another $137 million

on top of Payless's profits as punitive damages.

Punitive means in punishment for.

It comes from the same root as punishment.

And so we're going to apply double Payless's profits to the additional,

the award that Adidas gets in addition to their actual damages.

So over $300 million money out of pocket for Payless.

What about in China?

Well, China says, do we care?

They buy into copyright, by and large.

They buy into patent, as.

Perhaps a little less than some other governments, but it still matters.

What about trademark?

Well, when products hurt consumers, when fake milk product is sold, and

young children are sick or die because of fraud and

products that harm health or fake medicines, the government cares.

People are upset.

It's bad for the country, it's bad for the people.

The people are upset, and therefore, the government's upset, and therefore,

they say we need to do something.

But when people are buying cheap products on Taobao,

which is Alibaba, or when Americans are buying cheap

products on Amazon, and the products are pretty good quality, but

they're knockoff, maybe governments care less.

It may not be that they don't care, but they may care less.

And so therefore, their actions may be less enthusiastic or less supportive.

Now, bottom line, are trademarks important to society?

Yes, they're clearly valuable to business, and

any country that values business is going to value trademarks.

And so virtually, every country values trademarks, at least some.

But their value is less clear and less consistent across country to country.

Some governments care much more than others.

Some governments value trademark more than others.

So trademark value and

trademark protection is not the same from one country to another.

It matters differently across different countries.

Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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