When was the last time you checked what’s being sold online under your brand name? With Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30, now is a good time to look. Last year, Cyber Week (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) brought in $44.2 billion in U.S. online sales, and Cyber Monday set a single-day record at $14.25 billion, according to Adobe. Counterfeit products online are part of the picture too. In fiscal year 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported seizing nearly 79 million counterfeit items, which would have carried a retail value of over $7.3 billion if genuine. ( source , digitalcommerce , hstoday.us ) Why Counterfeits Surge During the Holidays Holiday shoppers are looking for deals and buying quickly. Counterfeiters take advantage of that urgency. UL Standards & Engagement’s 2024 Holiday Safety Guide found that 40% of holiday shoppers had been fooled into buying a counterfeit at least once. That matters to you as a brand owner, because CBP says counterfeits can pose health, safety, and economic risks and hurt U.S. businesses. What Online Trademark Infringement Looks Like It can include: Counterfeit listings on online marketplaces using your name and logo Look-alike websites that borrow your trademark. One security firm found a network of 198 fake sites illegally using famous brands’ trademarks ahead of a Black Friday sale. Social media posts promoting knockoffs of your products Under the Lanham Act, a counterfeit mark is identical or substantially indistinguishable from a registered trademark (15 U.S.C. § 1127). ( winston ) That word, registered , matters. Why Trademark Registration Matters Using your brand name for years doesn't automatically give you access to every enforcement tool. Several important protections require federal registration: Amazon Brand Registry: Amazon’s U.S. eligibility page calls for an active registered trademark, or a pending application filed through its IP Accelerator program. Amazon also asks you to show the mark on your products or packaging. Requirements can vary by Amazon store, so check the current rules before you enroll. CBP e-Recordation: This puts your mark on file with Customs so the agency can detain and seize counterfeit imports. It requires a mark registered on the Principal Register, so pending applications don’t qualify. The fee is $190 per class of goods, and renewal is $80 per previously recorded class. Statutory damages: In a counterfeiting case, you can elect set damages instead of proving your actual losses. The range is $1,000 to $200,000 per counterfeit mark per type of goods or services, and up to $2,000,000 if the use was willful (15 U.S.C. § 1117(c)). ( govinfo , govinfo ) A registration filed today won't protect you this Black Friday, but it can help protect your brand in the years ahead. Isn't the Marketplace Responsible? Not entirely . In Tiffany (NJ) Inc. v. eBay Inc., 600 F.3d 93 (2d Cir. 2010) , the court found that general knowledge of counterfeits on a platform wasn't enough to hold eBay liable. Specific knowledge of infringing listings mattered. ( arnoldporter ) In practice, brand owners still need to identify and report counterfeit listings. The INFORM Consumers Act, effective since June 2023, also requires marketplaces to collect and verify information from certain high-volume third-party sellers, making it harder for counterfeiters to operate anonymously. ( ftc ) Your Pre-Black Friday Checklist Here's what to do this month: Review your registrations. Make sure they cover your products and brand assets. Search online marketplaces. Check social media and third-party listings, too. Consider CBP recordation. Especially if your products are manufactured or shipped overseas. Identify authorized sellers. Make it easy for customers to find genuine products. Document suspicious listings. Save dated screenshots, seller information, and URLs. How Rosenthal IP Law Can Help Trademark clearance, registration, and strategy are at the heart of what I do. For enforcement matters such as marketplace takedowns and ongoing monitoring, I coordinate with trusted colleagues to connect clients with the right specialists. If you'd like to know where your brand stands before the holiday rush, contact Rosenthal IP Law to review your trademark portfolio and discuss an online brand protection plan. Protecting your brand starts with knowing what you own and making sure it's registered.

“ I made my logo with AI in about thirty seconds. Can I actually protect it? ” I hear some version of this more and more. The short answer is probably yes. The reason why says a lot about the difference between trademark and copyright. Trademark Doesn’t Care Who (or What) Made It In our post on AI and copyright , we covered Thaler v. Perlmutter, the case confirming that copyright requires human authorship. Content generated without meaningful human input generally can’t be copyrighted. Trademark asks a different question. It isn’t about how a mark was created. It’s about what the mark does in the marketplace: whether customers see it and associate it with your business. The USPTO doesn’t ask whether a person, a designer, or an AI tool came up with your AI-generated brand name or logo. It asks three things: Does it identify your business as the source of your goods or services? Is it distinctive, rather than generic or merely descriptive? Does it avoid a likelihood of confusion with someone else’s existing mark? If the answers are yes, an AI logo trademark application stands on the same footing as any other. Where AI Logos Run Into Trouble The problem usually isn’t the AI. It’s what AI tools tend to produce. They draw on enormous datasets, so they often generate designs that resemble existing marks or lean on generic industry imagery. Type “cloud” or “data” into a logo generator and you’ll see the same icons and circuit patterns again and again. The tool isn’t checking the USPTO database before it hands you a design. That makes a clearance search more important when a logo came from AI, not less. A “unique” logo that turns out to be confusingly similar to a registered mark can mean a refused application, or worse, a cease-and-desist letter after you’ve printed the signage. What You’ll Need to Show A few practical points if you want to trademark an AI-generated logo: Real use in commerce. The USPTO expects to see the mark actually in use, such as on packaging, a live website, or advertising. AI mockups or “coming soon” pages are not sufficient. A person or legal entity as owner. Only people and registered businesses can own a trademark, never the AI tool. Distinctiveness. A generic name paired with a generic icon gives you very little legal strength, however polished it looks. The Copyright Wrinkle Here’s where the two areas of law collide. Even after your AI-generated logo is trademarked, the artwork itself may not be copyrightable, per the same human-authorship rule from Thaler. Trademark stops others from using your mark to identify competing goods or services, but it doesn’t automatically stop someone from copying the design in every context. If a human designer meaningfully edits or builds on the AI output, that human contribution may carry its own copyright protection on top of the trademark. That’s a good reason to have a person put real creative work into the final version rather than using the raw AI output as-is. Before You Build a Brand Around It If you’ve generated a logo or name with AI and you’re about to spend real money on signage, packaging, and marketing, the order of operations matters: clearance search first, document your actual use, and then file. Skipping the search is the most common way an AI-generated brand identity turns into an expensive rebrand a year later. Whether you’re protecting a new logo or sorting out trademark AI-generated content more broadly, brand protection starts before you launch, not after someone else files first. Contact Rosenthal IP Law today to schedule a consultation on trademarking your AI-generated logo or brand name before the signage goes up.

If your team has been leaning on AI tools to generate blog posts, product images, or social content, here's a question worth asking before you publish the next one: who actually owns that content? For a lot of businesses, the honest answer is nobody, and that's a bigger problem than it sounds. The Basic Question The U.S. Copyright Office has been studying this since 2023, collecting public input and issuing guidance in stages. Its conclusion has stayed consistent throughout: copyright protection requires human authorship, and that requirement hasn't changed just because the tool doing the work became a lot more sophisticated. The case Thaler v. Perlmutter addressed this at the Federal level. A computer scientist generated an artwork entirely through an AI system and applied to register a copyright for the artwork, listing the AI system itself as the author. The Copyright Office refused registration, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that refusal in 2025, and on March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. That left the ruling standing: human authorship is a "bedrock requirement" of copyright, and content generated without meaningful human involvement simply falls outside of copyrightability. The harder, more practical question, one the Copyright Office has addressed in detail, is what happens when a human is the one typing the prompts. Its answer: prompts alone, no matter how detailed, generally don't make the person who wrote them the "author" of the output. A prompt functions more like an instruction than an expression, since the AI system is still the one making the real expressive choices, what the final image looks like, how a sentence is phrased, in between the prompt and the result.

Urgent

Say you run a coffee shop called "Morning Ritual," and then a new café across town opens up as "Morning Rituals." Customers start mixing the two up online, tagging the wrong shop in reviews, showing up at the wrong location for a promotion you never ran. That mix-up isn't just annoying; it's the exact kind of consumer confusion trademark law exists to prevent. The question is what to actually do about it, and that depends on getting a few things right before you pick up the phone. Step One: Make Sure It's Actually Infringement Not every similar name is a legal problem. Before doing anything else, it's worth asking: Does the other mark sound, look, or read similarly to yours? Is it being used for the same or related goods and services? Would a typical customer plausibly confuse the two? If those answers point toward "yes," you likely have a legitimate case. If the businesses operate in unrelated industries, or serve genuinely separate markets, there may be no infringement at all, and pursuing it burns time and legal fees for nothing. Build Your Record First Once you're confident it's a real conflict, start collecting proof before reaching out: screenshots of their website, social posts, packaging, or ads, etc. Make sure you record the date you captured the evidence and save it. If this ends up going further than a polite email, you'll want that record intact. (If you think this might go to court, an attorney should forensically capture this information.) The Cease-and-Desist Letter Comes Next This is the standard opening move in nearly every trademark dispute. A good cease-and-desist letter identifies your registered mark, explains specifically why the other party's use creates a problem, and requests that they stop, typically within a set timeframe. Keep the tone firm but professional rather than combative. It's entirely possible the other business had no idea your mark existed when they picked their name, and a measured letter resolves more disputes than an aggressive one. Attorneys generally draft these rather than business owners doing it solo, mostly because getting the legal language and scope right matters if the letter ends up as evidence later. If the Letter Doesn't Land Sometimes it works. Sometimes it's ignored entirely. When that happens, litigation becomes the real option. To win a trademark infringement suit, you typically need to establish three things: that you hold a valid registered mark or are otherwise the Senior User (i.e., have earlier rights in the trademark than the other party), that the other party is using an identical or confusingly similar mark on similar goods or services, and that the use is actually causing confusion or diluting your brand’s distinctiveness. Courts don’t take a plaintiff’s word for that confusion, either. They apply structured, multi-factor tests to evaluate it. The Second Circuit's approach, first laid out in Polaroid Corp. v. Polarad Electronics Corp., 287 F.2d 492 (2d Cir. 1961) , weighs things like the strength of your mark, how similar the two marks actually are, how close the products or services sit to each other, and any evidence of real-world confusion among customers. Most circuits apply some version of this multi-factor analysis, and while the specific factors shift slightly by jurisdiction, the underlying question stays the same everywhere: would a reasonable consumer actually be confused? What Winning Actually Gets You If a court sides with you, the most common outcome is an injunction, a binding order requiring the other business to stop using the mark. Depending on how the infringement happened and how deliberate it was, courts can also award financial damages covering lost profits and possibly legal costs, and in cases involving outright counterfeiting, criminal penalties can come into play too. Know When to Let It Go Worth remembering: some overlap genuinely isn't infringement. Comparative advertising and legitimate news reporting can qualify for fair use protection, and two businesses with similar names in clearly distinct markets sometimes just coexist without either side having a real claim against the other. If you're staring down a name conflict and can't tell whether it's worth pursuing, that's exactly the kind of question worth getting a real answer to before spending money on a letter or a lawsuit. Contact Rosenthal IP Law today to schedule a consultation, and let's figure out where you actually stand.

I often hear a common refrain: “I've been using this name for years, and nobody’s said anything, so I’m probably fine.” I understand that logic. But eventually, I get a phone call from that same business owner, and it is rarely a happy one. Another situation companies face is where they wait too long to file an application to register their trademark, only to find out that another company (that started using the same or a similar trademark at a later date) already filed an application. Common Law Rights Only Get You So Far Using a trademark does grant what are known as common law trademark rights. The problem is that these rights are geographically limited; they only protect you in the specific market where you’ve been doing business, not across the entire country. A federal registration with the USPTO provides a presumption of nationwide priority, the right to use the ® symbol instead of just ™, and a much stronger position in case of a dispute. While waiting to register a trademark does not negate your common law rights, it does leave the door open for someone else to claim rights in that same or a similar trademark elsewhere. What This Actually Costs You Filing a federal trademark application costs a few hundred dollars per product or service. This is a small price compared to the expenses of a forced rebrand, which includes new signage, packaging, and marketing, as well as the awkward task of explaining the name change to existing customers. Additionally, legal expenses incurred from responding to cease-and-desist letters can turn into an expensive procrastination habit. There’s also a quieter cost that often goes unbudgeted: lost search rankings, decreased web traffic, and a weaker position when trying to address copycat issues online. An unregistered mark leaves you with far fewer tools for enforcement. Your Filing Date Is Your Friend Here’s an unexpected advantage: your legal priority is established on the day you file, not when you receive the registration certificate (which can take 12 months or more, given USPTO timelines). Filing locks in your position in line nationwide. Generally, everyone who files after you is already behind you, registration or no registration. Therefore, it’s legally counterproductive to say, “I’ll wait until things calm down.” Don’t Let “Later” Become “Too Late” If a trademark registration is on your to-do list alongside “organize the garage,” I recommend moving it to the top of your priority list. Filing early is cheaper, stronger, and considerably less dramatic than waiting. If you’re a business owner seeking a trademark attorney or are currently involved in a dispute, Rosenthal IP Law is a trademark law firm that handles these matters daily, including application filings, oppositions, cancellations, and everything in between. Contact Rosenthal IP Law today to schedule a consultation on registering your trademark before someone else acts first, leaving you in a weaker position.