*I’m not an intellectual property lawyer, so don’t take any portion of this video as legal advice; this is just to steer you in the right direction. For specific questions about specific words or phrases, contact an intellectual property lawyer.
Within the last week alone I’ve heard of not one, but TWO self-publishers having their accounts terminated due to trademark infringement. There are multiple opportunities to accidentally use a trademarked word or phrase when publishing your book, so without taking a few necessary steps, you’re not only putting your KDP account at risk, but you risk legal action being taken from the trademark holder—not a situation you want to face!
While this can be a terrifying thing to hear, this situation is 100% avoidable by taking a couple of extra little steps.
Watch today’s video to find out:
- Where exactly to watch out for possibly trademarked words and phrases
- The necessary steps to avoid the use of a trademarked word or phrase
- How to use the USPTO database to see if a word or phrase has been trademarked
Taking these steps before creating another book, author name, or book description will help keep your KDP account safe from termination and your business safe from possible legal action. And, you’ll be able to rest easy knowing you’ve crossed all your “t”s, and dotted all your “i”s.
Links Discussed
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
Have you had any run-ins with inadvertent copyright or trademark infringement before? What was your experience, and how did you resolve it? Let me know in the comments below!
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A helpful reminder. Thanks! I do check USPTO generally already, but had a couple of wobbles with designs over on Zazzle a while ago. My advice – and this is pretty contentious – is generally to avoid sport-type products. There’s so much official merchandizing of sports teams, events, etc, that it’s easy to fall into trademark traps twenty times a second!
Here’s something else, which stopped me from publishing a low content book a few months ago. I had spent half a day researching and doing a cover for a book; thought it would be cute to match the color scheme to an actual company in the niche I was doing. Then I got cold feet and canned it, as I wasn’t sure whether corporate color schemes, etc are protected too!
So I checked – not in my specific case, but more generally – and color schemes can indeed be trademarked.
The example I found was the shade of purple used by Cadbury-Schweppes. It’s registered to them – and presumably still in force since Kraft bought the company – so you can’t just “color pick” that purple and use it, I guess. Maybe it only applies to other food products rather than book covers, etc. It’s an easy fix though if you just want a purple that’s fairly close – just make sure it’s not the EXACT same RGB color.
PS. I’m NOT an attorney – readers do your own research on this. 😉
Glad you found it useful, Neil! You’re right; sports team references should generally be avoided, as they are usually trademarked up the wazoo. And if ever in doubt, err on the side of caution!