The protection of brands, slogans, positioning statements and program titles must be a high priority of any electronic media company. These assets establish the identity of any broadcaster, webcaster or other media company.  Media companies need to protect these assets through the rights accorded by trademark law.  We have been running a series of articles on trademark law – including our five part series on the Basics of Trademarks (Part 5, which links to the other 4, is here). Next Tuesday, at 1 PM Eastern Time, Kelly Donohue and Mitch Stabbe of our trademark group are presenting a free webinar to further explain the importance of protecting all of your branding materials, and the legal issues that need to be considered by any company in looking to promote and protect these important identifiers of your products and services. You can sign up for this webinar by clicking here. This link will lead you to the sign-up page and provide further information about the webinar.

I’ve seen many broadcasters spend much time and money to develop some new positioning statement or on-air slogan, only to find out that some other company already has a trademark on the brand that they developed, effectively rendering all of their time and money wasted. Even program titles and DJ air names can be protected by trademark law. In fact, some companies produce significant revenue licensing their protected marks to others, and others protect station identities through trademark law. While state employment laws may limit noncompete agreements, the impact of the departure of a station DJ may be minimized if the station owns the name that the DJ has used on the air. Clearly, it is important that your company understand both how to protect and exploit its trademarks and its other promotional and branding assets. So join us for this important webinar next Tuesday.