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I believe you have to be able to show that you tried to stop others from infringing on your brand to protect your trademark at some future point in court.

Google sent letters to many people when 'google' was becoming a verb most likely for this reason.



Yep. If you don't protect your trademarks and copyrights you may lose them.


Trademark law is different from copyright law.

With trademarks you do have to defend them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_trademark...

However with copyrights they are yours from the moment you write something down to 70 years after you are dead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Obtaining_and_enforci...

(And the way things are going, that 70 year number will go up by 10 years every 10 years.)


Thanks for clarifying that. I'm not really sure why I said copyright as I know better than that, I must have been tired or not thinking straight.




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