In the USA, a chartered mark is a trademark or service mark which is given special statutory protection separate from the usual registration of trade marks and service marks. A chartered mark, in effect, is a type of trademark/servicemark in which the organization is granted the mark "by charter", i.e. by express grant of the legislature. When an organization is granted a chartered mark, no one else may use the same mark at all for any purpose. (There are possible exceptions for organizations using the same or a similar mark before it was chartered.)
Examples of chartered marks in the United States include FDIC for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the USA, respectively; and Olympic for the United States Olympic Committee.
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Famous quotes containing the words chartered and/or mark:
“The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it together again. They enjoy it. The artist takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things. He must.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,—which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)