We work on a lot of animated productions. They’re mainly for kids but we’ve also worked on plenty of more adult content (Archer comes to mind, and speaking of adult content how about Quads?). If you’d like to see a list of some of the animated projects we’ve worked on over the years, there’s a pretty good one here: easternscript.com/clients-and-credits/. Once at the page, after scrolling down to the header “TV Shows – Animated”, click on those words to expand a list for your perusal.
A standard live-action tv series clearance report focuses on making sure that your project is not identifying actual people, businesses, and products. Your writer is sitting in a room making up names: a few lawyers, then the judge, a couple of arresting officers, 1 victim and 3 possible perpetrators. Oh and let’s not forget the girlfriend, the ex-wife, and the estranged son. You then hire us to make sure that those names don’t accidentally get you into trouble. For an animated project, however, there’s an additional concern and that is merchandising, especially for children’s projects. If your “Sparkle Magic Heart Fairy Gnomes” show finds a lot of little kids in its thrall, you will very likely soon consider the possibility of selling them backpacks, pyjamas, jigsaw puzzles, dolls, etcetera with SMHFG artwork on them. And you can’t do that safely unless you already know that there are no conflicting trademark registrations out there. And you don’t want to do that trademark research at the end of a successful first season because then it’s too late, the sparkle magic heart fairy gnomes have already been named and fallen in love with.
So for animated projects, we do a bit more. Here is a bit more background, from our rate sheet for this work:
For animation projects, in addition to the standard person, business, and product name searching that we do for a live action clearance report we also check animation types of characters (animals, robots, you-name-it) in anticipation of possible merchandising.
We look for those names in the available international trademark databases in class 28 (toys/games) and report our findings, in addition to searching the internet and a list of online character sources.
The report will tell you how many registrations we find in the trademark classes searched and then additional fees will apply if you need specifics (owner, goods & services descriptions) on those listings. Further customizing of reports is available for an additional charge. This could be a request for searching in additional trademark classes, searching in specific country databases, etc.
Although it would seem that a kids’ cartoon show would involve less clearance work than a one-hour law firm procedural, I can tell you from many years of experience that the trademark screening we do for animation can be far more time-consuming. We not only search the two hundred or so international trademark databases for conflicts but we also look in a collection of sources that we have developed over the years of working in this niche that cover the world of fictional characters. If you are trying to come up with a unique snuggly one-word name for your adorable kitten fairy gnome, I can tell you that we will be spending a lot of time trying to sort that one out.
First published August, 2018