The most important thing you can do to protect your trademark globally is to register your mark in the countries where you are doing business or where you are selling product or you may do in business in the future. Although it may cost $2,000.00 or $3,000.00 to register a mark in a country, it’s much cheaper than trying to litigate a dispute later when an infringer starts using your mark. So I call that defensive registration, thinking about where you might register and prioritizing those countries or where you might use the mark in the future.

Another thing to think about in global registration is the cost can get very expensive when you’re talking about many countries, so I think we work a lot with clients to help prioritize the registration strategy, so focusing on most important marks. You know, in the U.S., you might have six marks registered – a word mark, a design mark, a tagline, some variations of those things. When you talk about global trademark protection, you want to focus on one or two key marks that you’re registering in other countries, and then with that, you might register just a few a year in a couple different countries to try and spread the costs out over time.

The other thing is, in the European community, there’s a European community registration where you can cover all the countries – currently 28 countries of the European Union – with one registration. So there are occasional cost savings like that, that allow you to register in more countries for less cost.