If you know where to look, you can learn a lot about what a trading card company is thinking behind closed doors. Resources are available that let you see into the future and discover what new products trading card companies are developing. A great, and unexpected, source of information is the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This is because most companies protect their future products before rolling them out. Also, if a company spends a lot of time, effort and money in procuring protections for its products, those products are likely very important to that company.

The USPTO’s trademark database is a good place to start. If a company develops a new product, that product needs a name. Product names can be protected as trademarks. The way to get the strongest protection for a trademark is to register it with the USPTO. Registration takes time, so if a company wants to launch a product that would be protected from day one, the trademark needs to be submitted to the USPTO prior to launch.

To get a registration, companies must first file trademark applications with the USPTO. Once filed, these applications are publicly available and can be searched from the USPTO’s home page.

Once on the home page, go to the TRADEMARKS section and select “SEARCH MARKS.” Using this database, you can do a search for “TOPPS” as the owner of a trademark. The results will show that on June 23, 2011, Topps filed for a trademark for the phrase, “Optimum Ink” for use with trading cards.

Read the full article at Cardboardconnection.com.