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Here’s a lightly-edited transcript of the video blog:
Hi, I’m Anthony Verna, managing partner, Verna Law, back for another video blog: We have some thoughts on trademark damages.
If you are going into federal court and you are going to be a plaintiff, here are a couple of thoughts for you.
Certainly, talking to our clients about getting money – and you’re going to get money, you’re going to get the lost profits and you’re going to be entitled to triple those damages.
You have to temper yourself a little bit about it because first off, number one, most cases don’t go to trial. Most cases settle. So obviously on some kind of settlement, there’s going to be a discount on the damages, but you’re going to take the discount damages. Why? Well, you know, it’s going to be less time in litigation and less time with legal fees. So that discount is generally taken in order to, uh, make the pain go away.
Don’t get me wrong, litigation can be painful. So that’s one particular thought there as to what, why damages might be less than a trademark infringement matter than you were probably hoping it is the potential plaintiff.
Also, many products have multiple trademarks. I’m going to pull this thing right here. It was way back to the old days of podcasting, the Blue Snowball. There it is the snowball, Blue and Snowball: two trademarks on one product.
If one of those products were one of those trademarks, excuse me – were to be infringing? What I would say is, is there’s a house Mark. And then there’s the, the brand Mark. And we do sometimes take into account. Well, how much does one Mark matter from the other? And, and especially in a case like that, you’re going to see again, your particular damages as a plaintiff are going to be discounted because there’s more than one Mark on the product.
A lot of products have more than one trademark as I’m sure you could see a lot of the stuff that’s behind me, probably it has more than one trademark, somewhere on the actual product. That’s going to be true here as well. So make sure that you go in with your eyes wide open into any particular type of litigation, because you need to make sure that you think about the kinds of damages that you may be entitled to
I’m Anthony Verna, managing partner of Verna Law. We are a full-service intellectual property and advertising law firm. You can see us vernalaw.com. Thanks very much. See you soon.