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[ks93]

Our company's product has been out over a year, and we're getting
around to registering the trademark, and I've got some questions:

We'd like to include a photographic image the product in the trademark
application in the expectation that a visual similarity by potential
copies would violate the trademark.

In earlier archives of the website our front page showed our product
with a background.  For purposes of the application, Can we crop out
the unnecessary background to generate the graphic mark , and still
retain the date of priority that the website page had ?

Any help, pointers or citations is appreciated,

[JSonnabend]

As a general proposition, one does not register "the product" as a trademark.  Instead, one generally registers its name, logo, label, etc.  In these instances, submitting a picture of the product itself would lead to a largely useless registration.

That said, one can seek trademark registration for product packaging configuration and even product configuration itself.  These fall under the heading of "trade dress", and are difficult to push through the PTO (and to protect at all).  The fairly recent Supreme Court case of Wal-Mart Stores v. Samara Bros. discusses trade dress protection at some length.

- Jeff

[nsmart27]

that's an interesting reference.

Thank you,