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• INTRODUCTION

• TRADEMARK BASICS 
  • What is a Trademark? 
  • Why Trademark? 
  • Why Protect Trademarks? 
• OUR TRADEMARKS 
  • Our Company name
  • Our "house" trademark
  • Our "dot-com" servicemark
  • Our "house" logo
  • Our "family" trademarks
  • Our "phrase" trademarks
• GUIDELINES (for our marks)
  • Our marks are important
  • Product names
  • References to eOffice Brands' marks 
  • Always use our marks as proper adjectives 
  • Do not combine our trademarks with an improper generic
  • Do not use our trademarks as possessive or in plural
  • Do not abbreviate or create acronyms 
  • Company names
  • Internet (or web) site names 
  • Special Internet Considerations

INTRODUCTION: 

eOffice Brands is the owner of valuable trademarks which are listed in this guidebook.  Our trademarks are important to us because they represent the standards of quality and excellence that are associated with our products and services, which are available world wide.

We actively engage our customers, employees, partners and the public at large with the correct use of our trademarks through public notice and information guides. 

The following guidebook contains basic information about trademarks.  It also contains usage guidelines that apply to our trademarks.

We hope you find this guidebook helpful.

For more information please send email to:

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TRADEMARK BASICS:
 

What is a Trademark?

• A trademark is a word, name, design, or phrase that identifies a product (or service) and distinguishes it from similar products or services made or offered by competitors.

• Without trademarks, consumers would not be able to distinguish similar products and services from different manufacturers.  One manufacturer may provide a better quality product than the other. An absence of trademarks leads to confusion for consumers, which subsequently leads to lost goodwill for manufacturers and service providers. 

• Properly used, a trademark can provide its owners a legally protected position, indefinitely.   But, if used improperly, a trademark can become diluted or fall into generic use and lose its protected status.

• The following are now generic words (some of them listed in the English dictionary) because they were not protected by their owners:

• harmonica
• yo-yo
• aspirin
• zipper
• escalator

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OUR TRADEMARKS:

Our Company name:

eOffice Corporation,  d/b/a eOffice Brands

Our Company name is eOffice Corporation, d/b/a eOffice Brands.  When referring to our Company, no trademark symbols are needed; only eOffice branded products and services require a trademark symbol.

The eOffice® trademark is our "house mark."  It is used to identify all products and services that originate from us.  The eOffice® trademark is a registered trademark, listed on the Principal Trademark Register of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Our servicemark eOffice.com^SMis the unique identifier of our forthcoming, brandname online service. This service will be accessible via Internet connectivity, using www.eoffice.com as the Internet address. 

This logo is our "house" logo.  Much like (eOffice®) our house trademark, our house logo is used to identify our company and all products and services that originate from us.

Our "family" trademarks identify certain products and services we offer under the eOffice® brand. 

We also own certain "phrase" trademarks.  Our phrase trademarks are used in association with advertising, collateral material and product  packaging.  We place the appropriate symbol ( ^TM or ® ) immediately after our phrase trademarks to indicate ownership.

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GUIDELINES (for our marks):

1. OUR MARKS ARE IMPORTANT

eOffice Brands' trademarks are valuable corporate assets.

Without a specific trademark license from eOffice Brands,  eOffice Brands' marks MAY NEVER be incorporated or included in your product name or company name.

Correct references to any eOffice Brands trademark should contain the following notice:
 
• [*trademark] " . . . is a trademark or registered trademark of eOffice Brands in the United States and/or other countries."
*Substitute the mark which is to be referenced.

Trademarks identify a company's goods and services. A trademark is a proper adjective that modifies the generic name of a product or service.  eOffice® is our house mark which is used to identify all products and services that originate from us.  On the other hand, for example, our SiteLaunch^SM mark identifies the eOffice Brands SiteLaunch family of services.

Examples:
 

Proper Adjective	Generic name or descriptor
eOffice®	Software & Services
eOffice.comSM	Internet Service Site
SiteLaunchSM	Service

Enterprise^TM is the mark we use to identify the eOffice Brands Enterprise family of products.  Applications designed to run with the Enterprise family are not "eOffice Enterprise applications", but rather applications for the eOffice Brands Enterprise family.

7. DO NOT ABBREVIATE OR CREATE ACRONYMS
 

Do Not Say:

"e-O" for eOffice

8. COMPANY NAMES

eOffice Brands' trademarks MAY NEVER be incorporated in your company name (whether a corporate name or d/b/a).

Do not use the eOffice® trademark in your Internet domain name.  Because the purpose of trademarks is to identify the source of a product or service, if eOffice Brands'' trademarks were combined with the trademarks, product names or internet domain names of others, consumers or Internet users may be confused as to which company is the source of a product or web site. 

Internet sites, web pages and search engines may reference terms in web page titles or "hidden" keywords and meta tags and search listings. 

With regard to eOffice Brands' trademarks, follow the guidelines outlined above when referencing eOffice Brands' trademarks on the Internet. 

While not conclusive, the following points address some of the more common places a trademark can appear on the Internet.  If you need to remove an unauthorized reference to a trademark on the Internet, refer to the appropriate procedure below. 

NOTE:  You may need to source professional help to accurately execute the removal of an unauthorized trademark reference found on the Internet.

• Web pages are usually comprised of content that is visible to the eye via an Internet browser.  There is also an invisible portion of a web page, frequently called "Meta-Tags", Keywords and the like.  These elements are not usually visible to the eye, but on the other hand, these invisible elements are made available to search engines or other cataloging and formatting utilities on the Internet.

• HOW TO REMOVE TRADEMARK REFERENCE:

• Delete the trademark from the visible content of the web page.
• Delete any keywords, meta-tags and other identifiers such as image names or filenames that reference the trademark, as well.
• Re-publish the new web page.

NOTE:  If the trademark is in part of the URL for the web page, please refer to the procedure below (URLs/Domain Names).  You may have to rename the URL or Domain name related to the web page as well, before republishing the web page.

• URLs and Domain Names are frequently used as an HTTP pointer that points to a specific web page or web site on the Internet.  A good way to think of them is to think about telephone numbers.  A URL or Domain Name is similar to a telephone number in the way a telephone number points to a specific telephone line, at a specific physical street address. A trademark can be part of a URL or Domain Name.

• Examples: 
   

  Domain Name:
   

  www.trademark.com or www.thisdomain-trademark.com can point to a specific web site. (usually the home page of a web site)
  URL: 
  http://www.thisdomain-trademark.com/thispage.html points to a page contained somewhere on the Internet.

• HOW TO REMOVE TRADEMARK REFERENCE:

• For domain names, contact the authorizing registrar for global Internet Domain Names (usually Network Solutions, Inc.) www.networksolutions.com.  Have the domain name changed so that the trademark is no longer a part of the domain name.
   
• For URLs, simply rename each URL so that the trademark no longer appears as part of the URL.  
   

  NOTE: You may have to update other web pages with URLs that made reference to the renamed URL.

• KEYWORDS or KEY PHRASES can be trademarks that appear in search engine indexes as a result of being used in Domain Names, URLs and Web Page Contents, including invisible web page contents such as Meta-Tags, web page Keywords, and other identifiers, such as image names, filenames and hyperlinks.

• HOW TO REMOVE TRADEMARK REFERENCE:

• Locate the trademark reference (ie: web page content, domain name, URL) and delete the reference.
• Contact each search engine and ask for their procedures for removing a listing from their search engine (You can usually find this information on their web page). 
   

  For example: 

  As of January, 1999, the AltaVista"! Search Site at www.altavista.com has instructions posted at the bottom or their main page for adding (and removing) pages and URLs from their index. 

  NOTE:  To ensure that a listing is removed from a search engine's index, you typically have to remove the actual URL from a server computer, as the search engine may attempt to access the specified URL to verify that it no longer exists before it will actually remove the listing from the search engine indexes.