Is the register by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seachable by the public? Is it possible to review the data base of existing marks beforehand? Or must one assume the government's data base is in perfectly good order?
The register of trademarks can indeed be searched before an application is filed, and any prudent applicant will make, or pay an expert to make, such a search. Note that each country has its own trademark register (although some EU countries are working on a shared EU register, I understand). Marks registered in one country will not be protected under the laws of another, unless they separately qualify for protection under the laws of the second country. Note that in the US, marks that have never been registered but are in active use receive some trade mark protection, although not as much as those that have been registered. Searching for unregistered marks in current use is significantly harder than searching for registered marks. Application may be refused for conflict with an active, unregistered mark. Also in the US, registered marks may have their registrations canceled if they are not in use for a significant time, I believe at least 5 years. Many advise hiring a firm that specializes in trademark applications to do the entire application, including searches. This involves significant added cost. US trademark searches may be done via the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) Some information about doing such searches is provided at Search trademark database (an official USPTO page). That page states: Private trademark attorneys If you are an applicant, registrant, or party to Trademark Trial and Appeal Board proceedings domiciled in the United States or its territories, you are not required to have a U.S.-licensed attorney represent you at the USPTO. However, deciding what to search for and interpreting your results can be complicated. There are many factors to consider in determining likelihood of confusion. We can’t advise you on how to do a clearance search for your mark, do one for you, or interpret your search results. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to hire a U.S.-licensed attorney who specializes in trademark law to guide you throughout the application process. If you are a foreign-domiciled applicant, registrant, or party to Trademark Trial and Appeal Board proceedings, you must be represented at the USPTO by an attorney who is licensed to practice law in the United States. See the why hire a private trademark attorney webpage to learn more about what an attorney can do for you and how to find one. For more information about conducting a clearance search, please watch the news broadcast-style video titled “Searching” (video #3 in the Trademark Information Network (TMIN) series). I am sure that similar searches of the register in other countries are available.
You are correct that it is quite expensive to patent something in U.S. law. Under U.S. patent law, once an idea is publicly published, if no one else has a patent application for the same idea that is pending, the idea enters the public domain and no one can obtain a patent of that idea. The publication become "prior art" with respect to any future patent application which cannot be protected by patent law. Of course, if you publish an invention which you discovered independently, that someone else already has a patent application pending for that will be approved the following week, the fact that you published it after the patent was applied for doesn't prevent the person with the pending patent application from having it approved. The term "invention" rather than "idea" is what I will use for the remainder of this answer, because there are many ideas which may not be patented, while the lion's share of patentable ideas are appropriately described as "inventions." But, understand that as used in this answer, the term "invention" is being used to refer to the concepts and ideas necessary to make the invention, and not to a particular instance of a product made using those concepts and ideas. When an invention is in the public domain, anyone can utilize the invention free of charge without a license. People who use the invention are not even required to acknowledge that you invented or discovered it. An invention is also not eligible to be patented if more than a year has elapsed since the first sale of a product using it. But, in that case, the invention can still be protected as a trade secret until it is voluntarily disclosed in some fashion to someone who is not subject to a non-disclosure agreement. (I say voluntary, because the fact that, for example, an unauthorized corporate spy sees the trade secret doesn't end the status of the invention as a trade secret.) Some inventions, are effectively publicly disclosed and published the moment that anyone looks at it closely. The patentable element of other inventions are invisible to an end user, or to observer of an end user. For example, if the invention involves something in the interior of a device, or the invention involves something not visible to the naked eye (e.g. a process for synthesizing an industrial chemical from other chemicals where the chemical formula of the ingredients and end result can't be determined without a microscope or analytical chemistry tests), merely showing someone a product made using the invention will not put it in the public domain. It is generally legal to reverse engineer or independently come up with an invention which is merely a trade secret. It is not legal to use a patented invention or process, even if it is not directly copied and is instead reverse engineered or independently discovered, during the lifetime of the patent. There is no straightforward way to put an invention into the public domain while retaining any right to acknowledgement that you invented it or otherwise exercise control through a licensing agreement without patenting it.
The simple way is to post a picture of you and the widget to a site like Flickr. A more expensive way (but with rather more weight) is to get a Notary to certify they saw you and the widget on January 9th. Both the above provide evidence you had access to the widget before January 10th, but neither prove you owned it. For that, you would need a dated (possibly even notarized) bill of sale or similar - but if you acquired the widget via a gift, that won't work. A signed witness statement from the giver would probably serve (and the statement could legitimately be created when you are prosecuted). None of the above are unforgeable - but you don't need that. Depending on how the law is written, you will only need to show ownership on the balance of probabilities, or you might only need to show reasonable doubt that you didn't own it on 9th January.
Trademarks apply only to a limited field. If you follow the link, it reports that it applies to class 42, graphic art design. So you are free to use (and register &quot;mama&quot; for your food delivery service, for example.
For the first question - No, patents are territorial. A US patent is not &quot;working&quot; anywhere else. Of course one can apply in multiple countries if the proper time frames and procedures are followed. There is a mechanism (PCT Treaty) that allows a straightforward way to apply in over a 140 countries simultaneously. Although it is frequently used, it is expensive to continue to prosecute the application in each place and even in high-value inventions only a handful of places are eventually chosen to actually pursue patents. Each country's/region's laws and processes are different and success in patenting can vary. Normally two countries would not have the same thing patented by different inventors. The patenting or publication of the first one would make it prior art to the second filed one. This should be found by the second examiner and stop a duplicate patent by a second inventor. However there can be subtle differences between similar inventions and mistakes do happen. In the case of true simultaneous invention this can happen. To get a patent, the invention must be novel - that means no one has published or patented it anywhere in the world at any time in any language. Before the AIA law in the U.S. the law said &quot;or known in this country&quot;. It could have made a loophole where something was known publicly elsewhere but did not constitute prior art in the U.S. That is now changed to be world-wide. Even if the examiner does a world wide search they might miss something and a patent might get issued even though the invention was not novel and a patent elsewhere is granted. To invalidate it the original patent owner would need to look into available procedures in country A. It might be court or it might be administrative. In most places an annual “renewal” fee must be paid to keep a patent in-force. In the U.S. a “maintenance” fee must be paid at the 3.5 year, 7.5 year and 7.5 year points in order to stay in-force. A patent who’s renewal or maintenance fee hasn’t been paid is expired for fee reasons. That can imply that it can be revived by the patent owner by paying the fees and usually a penalty. There may be a time limit or a small set of allowable circumstances to revive. A patent labeled expired for fee reasons might now be past its normal lifespan and therefore not revivable. In general patents are given to inventors and those an inventor assigns their rights to. Someone else can’t come along and revive a patent they had nothing to do with originally. There is no “re-patenting”.
As was mentioned in a comment, in the United States, businesses are generally registered at the state level. The information collected, and the extent to which or manner in which the public has access to it, varies from state to state. There may still be states where that's a paper-only process, but I'd guess in most of them it's accessible online, at least for basic information. For example, in Michigan the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs has a Business Entity Search tool. If a business deals directly with consumers, it may be a member of the Better Business Bureau. Even if it isn't, but consumers have complained about it, the BBB will make public the information it has about the purported business. If a company is publicly traded (that is, it's corporation that issues stock, and the stock is traded on a stock exchange), it is required by law to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC's EDGAR tool will display the company's filings, which should include annual and quarterly reports. If the company is or wants to be a government contractor, it generally needs to register with the General Services Administration, and certain information about successfully registered entities is publicly viewable in that system. (Conversely, the same system also lists "Excluded Parties" who are prohibited or partially restricted from doing business with the government.) Depending on what the business does, it may also be subject to registration with and regulation by additional state or federal agencies. For a full picture, however, unless you're dealing with the obvious agent of a Fortune 500 company, you'll probably want to get information from a private credit-check service as well; for example, as also mentioned in a comment, Dun &amp; Bradstreet for the business itself, or for a really small business a personal credit report on each of the owners and officers.
Yes, you may The layout of the board and its appearance are not protected by copyright, because they are not expressions or any other type of copyrightable content. Even if they were (say if some protested art was displayed on the board) you are displaying this for instructional purposes, and not harming any market for the board, so fair use is likely to apply (in the U.S.). The device could be protected by patent, but you are not copying or imitating the board, nor showing anyone how to do so, so that would not apply. You are not selling or advertising the board, nor knock-offs of it, so trademark protection would not apply, even if a protected trademark is visible on th board. Just in case, be sure to make clear that your video is not authorized or endorsed by the maker of the board.
In US law, a trademark application only requires that you are now selling, or intend to sell in the reasonably near future, a product (or service) using the specified name. You don't have to provide an example, or a design, and it does not have to be patented. The applicant might be planning to license someone else's patent, or to market off-the-shelf tech not protected by patent. The applicant might be planning to market tech still under development and not yet ready to be submitted for a patent. I do not know Chinese trademark law, but I suspect it is similar in this regard. I have not heard of any country that requires a patent, a design, or an example of a working product along with a trademark registration. However, there is, in many countries, a requirement that actual sales occur within a limited period after the trademark is granted, and if this does not happen, the trademark registration may be canceled. The time allowed varies.