For startup companies, becoming entangled in a trademark lawsuit can be daunting and expensive. The owners of Marshmallow, a startup insurance provider, were put to the test when Marsh, a 113-year old international insurance giant, opposed Marshmallow's trademark and demanded they change their name. However, the startup didn't back down and the European Patent Office ruled in their favor. The Times reached to Finnegan attorney Clare Cornell for her thoughts on trademark disputes between large and small companies.
Clare said:
With the correct legal advice, the majority of disputes can be resolved without drawn-out legal proceedings. It may be that if a company has inadvertently infringed a larger company's trademark rights, a modification to the trademark or an agreement to restrict the way the mark will be used will resolve the dispute. In fact, many disputes are resolved this way without going to court, particularly oppositions to trademark registrations.
However, she also warned:
Although reported trademark infringement cases tend to look like large companies unfairly picking on small companies, in most of these cases the large companies have intellectual property rights that are valid and enforceable and the smaller company has either misunderstood the breadth of a trademark right or taken a chance by adopting an identical or highly similar mark.
