5 Simple Ways to Lock Down and Protect Your Photography Brand

1. Be unique or work hard at becoming unique.

A trademark is just a legal term for a concept with which you are already familiar: identity. A trademark is the public, market-facing identity you present to your consumers. Your customers need to know you in order to choose you, and the more unique someone is, the more we remember them. But what we must also understand is that a trademark is a literal asset, one that can be bought, sold or sued over if its value is harmed. And how do we determine the value of your mark? By how easily it is recognized by customers. The more unique you are, the more work you put into making your brand recognizable and famous, the more money your trademark is worth.

2. Protect your brand and products.

Merely having a unique brand, though, is not enough if others copy it. You must also protect that brand, legally, from the dangers to which trademarks are vulnerable—not just from thieves directly copying your mark and pretending to be you, but also from competitors using marks that are so similar to yours that customers are confused about who is who. The first line of defense for your mark is federal trademark registration, and it is vital because you cannot sue anyone under federal trademark laws unless you have a federal trademark registration.

The second line of defense is just as important, and it is active enforcement of your trademark. If you hold registration for your mark but never pay attention to who is using it without your permission, then the value of your mark is weakened. If other market actors use your mark or an extremely similar mark in a way that makes your own mark less unique, your mark’s value is diluted. If they use your mark in a way that makes your products or services seem trashy or inappropriate, your mark’s value is tarnished. If they simply use a confusingly similar mark, your mark has been infringed, and if you passively allow your mark to be infringed, tarnished, diluted or otherwise harmed, then your damages will be very low when you do finally come into court, even if your mark is later infringed by a powerful actor like Apple or Coca-Cola. Damages are meant to restore what was lost, and if your mark had a low value, then low damages are sufficient to restore your mark’s value to what it was.

3. Your brand is bigger than your name.

Always remember that your trademark covers not just the exact word, phrase, symbol, sound or other indicia of identity that you have registered, but also what we might call the sphere of similarity around it. This includes any mark close enough to your mark that a customer may be confused is yours. This is a very context- and market- specific determination; another company in a totally different industry than yours can get away with a mark quite similar, but your direct competitor could potentially infringe your mark merely by having a similar shape, color or sound. It is important to recognize that this sphere of similarity surrounding your mark includes everything that a business can do to show its identity: the colors on its walls, the jingles in its commercials, and, most importantly in our digital age, the hashtags on its social media and metatags on its website.

Even if you have a registered trademark for your brand, you should also make sure that hashtags and metatags with that name, or names that may be confusingly similar, belong to you and that you’ve registered all the principal domain suffixes for your brand name or catchphrase online. You don’t want someone establishing a website with your business name or slogan because even if that site has nothing to do with you, its mere existence is diluting your brand’s mark.

4. Work smart with others.

Any time you give any other party permission to use your name, you are risking trademark issues—you don’t know how that party will use your name or what associations they will give it. If you enter into licensing or franchising contracts with other companies or vendors, make sure that the financial and legal conditions of your partnership are firmly cleared on paper and have been drafted or at least reviewed by legal professionals. Those conditions should include clear guidelines for how your brand will be used by others: how often they can use the mark, how large or clear the mark should be, whether they alone can use your mark or if they can sublicense it to another brand. Once the goodwill in a mark is lost, it is very hard to get back, even with a lawsuit.

5. Make it known your brand is owned.

Put trademark symbols on everything that is registered, watermark your images, and do everything you can to make it clear that your mark is a part of your identity and subject to legal protection. When someone knows clearly that your mark is owned but infringes it anyway, that infringement is willful and your damages may be much higher if you are forced to sue.

Aaron M. Arce Stark is a lawyer for artists and entrepreneurs. Learn more about his law firm, Arce Stark & Haskell LLP, at ashlawllp.com.

This article is for informational purposes only. Contact a lawyer for legal advice.

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