Many of you already know about Snuggle Hamster Designs’s (SHD’s) website. Quite a few Zazzlers have set up shop and brought our total product count to almost 67,000 already. Most are still getting settled in since our public launch a little over a month ago and have yet to try out our various analytics tools.
Today I’m announcing a new pair of features related to trademarks. Many of you have gotten messages from Zazzle about possible copyright or trademark infringement in your works. Most often these come to Zazzle’s attention because intellectual property (IP) rights holders hire brand managers to scour the web looking for mentions of their brands. After a little research they decide to send takedown requests to sites like Zazzle. I wanted to help you get ahead of these by enabling you to do your own research.
The Trademark Search page is just what it sounds like. The US Patent and Trademark office has its own good search too. But this one is simply tailored for Zazzle and will show you how many SHD products match the “mark’s” text:
And you can click on the count of products to go see exactly which products do match.
The Trademark Analysis tool is the flipside of that. It’ll show you which marks match exactly which products in all your stores. There could be a lot of data. So it’s broken down so you can drill down into it:
In the case of my own stores there are 2,252 marks that match products within them.
To be clear, 99% or more of these are purely textual matches but do not represent trademark violations. I think a lot of Zazzlers are understandably confused about what trademarks really and actually protect. They are far more limited than many believe. This tool provides important context by showing you the usage notes explaining the context that carves out the limited scopes of different trademarks. I also wrote a brief introductory guide to the subject of trademarks for Zazzlers.
Below are links to our knowledge base articles on all the above:
