Can i trademark my business name myself [New Data]

Last updated : Aug 14, 2022

Can I trademark my business myself?

Yes, you can trademark yourself, as long as you are in connection with your products or services. This information was provided by our founding attorney, Xavier Morales, Esq. It is possible for an individual to trademark an image of themselves as a product's logo.

Can I trademark the name of my business?

Business names, product names, logos and labels can all be trademarks. You acquire a trademark by using your mark in commerce—in other words, using it when you conduct your business. For additional protection, you can register a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Can you register a trademark yourself?

You can do this yourself on the USPTO database, and/or you can hire a professional firm or attorney to engage in this process. Fill out the trademark application on the USPTO website. The forms are fairly self-explanatory. You will list your name, business information, and describe your mark.

Can I trademark my business name for free?

Can I trademark a name for free? You can not register a trademark for free. However, you can establish something known as a "common law trademark" for free, simply by opening for business.

How long does a trademark last?

A federal trademark lasts 10 years from the date of registration, with 10-year renewal terms. Between the fifth and sixth year after the registration date, the registrant must file an affidavit to state that the mark is still in use.

What is the cheapest way to trademark?

The basic cost to trademark a business name ranges from $225 to $600 per trademark class. This is the cost to submit your trademark application to the USPTO. The easiest and least expensive way to register your trademark is online, through the USPTO's Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS).

Should I get a trademark or LLC first?

It is important to get BOTH an LLC and a trademark and it is best to form the LLC BEFORE applying for a trademark. Each offers different protections, and they work together to provide broad protection for your business. It is better to form an LLC before filing a trademark application.

Do I need to trademark my small business name?

There's no legal requirement for you to register a trademark. Using a business name can give you 'common law' rights, even without formally registering it.

How do I make sure no one steals my business name?

Your brand is your company's identity, so it's critical to secure it with a trademark, which prevents someone from improperly using your business name or branding. To get a trademark, you'll need to file an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

What are the three requirements for trademarks?

• Arbitrary, fanciful, or suggestive: If a mark is a part of one of these three categories, the mark is inherently distinctive.
• Descriptive: A descriptive mark can only be trademarked if it has taken on a second meaning.
• Generic: Marks that are generic are never trademarked.

What is required for a trademark?

Two basic requirements must be met for a mark to be eligible for trademark protection: it must be in use in commerce and it must be distinctive. The first requirement, that a mark be used in commerce, arises because trademark law is constitutionally grounded in the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce.

How long does it take to trademark a name?

Usually, the process takes 12 to 18 months. Registering your trademark is a complex procedure that involves your application moving through various stages. Learning about each stage in the process will help you understand why getting a trademark takes as long as it does.

How much is a trademark worth?

Trademarks can have no value, or can be very valuable indeed – it all depends on the business associated with the mark!

How much does trademark registration cost?

The cost of registration per application is about Rs. 4000. If any person is registering its brand or register logo under many categories, then he/she have to pay Rs. 4000 per category.

How much does it cost to get a name trademarked?

The official fee charged by the Indian trademark office is Rs. 4500 (Individuals, Startups and Small and Medium Enterprises – SME's) and Rs. 9000 (for others) per mark per class.

What is a trademark secret?

A trade secret: is information that has either actual or potential independent economic value by virtue of not being generally known, has value to others who cannot legitimately obtain the information, and. is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.

What can I do with a trademark?

A trademark protects a good or service offered by a company from infringement or damage of reputation by another company. With a trademark, you have legal recourse to sue another company that uses your likeness to further their own business ventures. This includes both registered and unregistered trademarks.

Can you lose a trademark if you don't protect it?

If you don't enforce your trademark, you risk losing reputation, business, sales, customers, and more to the infringer. There's also a concept in trademark law called abandonment. Generally, if you don't use your mark for three years or more, it's considered abandoned.

Where is the best place to trademark a name?

• The Best Trademark Registration Services of 2022.
• LegalZoom.
• Trademark Engine.
• Rocket Lawyer.
• JPG Legal.
• Trademark Plus.
• TrademarkCenter.
• Trademark Factory.

What's the difference between LLC and trademark?

Legal Protection LLCs and trademarks are each an integral part of the business world, but both serve different purposes. While LLCs are legal business entities that protect the personal assets of business owners from lawsuits and bankruptcies, trademarks protect the intellectual property of the business.

Check these related keywords for more interesting articles :
How to buy a drug patent
How to describe trademark
Intellectual property rights definition and purpose
Can you trademark archetype
Intellectual property business plan example
Trademark application form canada
Trademark or copyright website
Intellectual property lawyer salary south africa
Should i trademark or copyright a phrase
Can you have the same trademark name
How to register and patent a business name
What does brand affinity mean
How to register a horse brand in nsw
Do you copyright or trademark an image
How to get partnerships with brands

Write a comment

hi this is attorney sarah holmes and we are answering another common trademark question that we get which is can i trademark the name or logo of my brand myself the answer to that is yes i suppose you could but you could also you know um do dental surgery on yourself right but would you do that no why because you don't have the experience or the knowledge to do dental dental surgery on yourself now that might be kind of an extreme example and certainly people do diy and submit trademark applications themselves all the time however what i will tell you is that the application may look deceptively simple at times and by that i mean the uspto is very particular in terms of what they're asking you if you do not respond exactly in the way that they want you to respond they will send you a refusal for your mark if you get a refusal it makes it that much more difficult for anybody to straighten that out and be able to salvage your application oftentimes they do not allow significant edits after you've already submitted an application so if it turns out you submitted something wrong there are certain things we just can't fix or we can't expand the scope of your application once it's been submitted the other reason is that the search that most consumers can do on their own is not the same type of search that an attorney could do for example you might be able to search the uspto database and say i saw no exact matches to my name i think i can go ahead and submit this application well that's not the same search that we would do we have special software that we use that combs and analyzes things registered with uspto they look at things on google they see in what other states a business might have a similar name registered and then we analyze the results from that finally uspto is not only concerned with exact name matches to yours so even though it may look like no one else is using your exact name uspto is looking to see whether someone is using a name that sounds like your name whether it means your name in another language whether it's something that could rhyme with your name it could mean the opposite of your name there's a million different ways that they're going to analyze that to see if it in fact is in conflict with another registration and it's not just exact matches so again to sum up yes you certainly could submit your own trademark application you're within your rights to do that but there is a reason that you might pay uh legal counsel do it for you and that's largely in handling the details responding to objections and conducting an adequate and thorough search on the front end to give your application a better chance of going through if you need help with the trademark registration feel free to reach out to our office we can help clients nationwide with trademark matters 215-482-0285 thanks

Thanks for your comment Aaron Rubi, have a nice day.
- Kymberly Bravata, Staff Member

hey hey party people welcome welcome to Rachael Rogers TV I'm Rachael Rodgers and I hope you are enjoying this lovely fall day I'm here in New York where we're about to get into some serious apple picking and you know everything is flavored pumpkin which is awesome today I would answer a question for you that I have been answering for many years at least three times a week every single week for essentially the last five years so I'm gonna dive into this question today because obviously it's about that time that I finally got around to doing a Rachael Rogers TV episode on it so today I'm going to answer the question should I trademark my logo or my business name now if you are a business owner that is ready to take action on protecting your brand the way that you're gonna do that is with trademark registration so most of my clients when they are ready to take action and protect their brand their next question is what things should I do first right and usually the question is around should I register my company name or should I register of the logo that has the company name in it okay so there are a couple of ways that I evaluate in this situation now you know if we were all big corporations and had endless legal budgets then we would just register both the company name and the logo that is the ideal way to get the maximum amount of trademark protection for your brand however most of my clients and myself included are small businesses right so we have limited legal budgets and so we need to really maximize what we're spending to get the maximum amount of protection for the least amount of money and that's what I help my clients do so when we're looking at a company that has a great company name they need to protect but then they also have a logo how do we decide these are the factors that I look at so when you are thinking about whether to start by registering the trademark for your company name or whether to start by registering the trademark for your logo the biggest thing you want to consider is what is making the bigger impact with your customers are your customers more impacted and more connected to your company name or are they more connected to your logo now there is a rule of thumb here typically if you're in a product based business where you are selling a physical product that has your logo on it or has your logo on the packaging then your logo is usually making the bigger impact with your customers right because they are seeing your product on a shelf with a bunch of other products or they're getting it in the mail with all kinds of packaging with your logo on it so the logo tends to be more impactful and a really big deal for physical products so if you're selling a physical product where whether it's you know a t-shirt design where the logo better than the t-shirt or whether it's a candle and the logos on the packaging for the candle the logo is making a big impact and you're spending a ton of money right to manufacture all of those products with your logo on it so your logo becomes a really big deal and it's really really important to protect it in that case however if you are in a service business usually it's your company name that is making the bigger impact service businesses tend to get their clients through you know the internet right so you're getting your clients online they're coming to your website and they're seeing your company name your company name is usually a part of or is your domain name right so that's the address that they're typing in when they're looking for you and then your company name is also on your business cards it's on your marketing materials that's really what they're connecting with right and service businesses tend to get a lot of their customers through referrals so that means that you know Joe Schmoe is telling their friends hey you should hire Rogers collective or whatever the name of your company is right so if you are in a product based business then the logo is likely the more important trademark that you need to protect to begin and if you are in a service business then more than likely your company name is more important to start with if you are in a business where you truly feel that both your logo and your company name are equally important and equally impactful on your customers then the only way to avoid registering both the logo and the company name totally depends on what your logo looks like it is possible to get a two-for-one deal where you get protection for your company name and your logo in one trademark application but only where the only words that appear in your actual trademark are your company name if your company name are the only words or numbers or punctuation that are included in your logo design then you will get protection for those words so the company the words that make up your company name you'll get protection for those as part of the logo design right so if I registered the logo for Rogers collective that I would have protection for the words Rogers collective as well however the problem comes in when you have a logo that has other words numbers or punctuation in it in addition to your company name for example this Rogers collective logo has the company name Roger's collective but it's also got our tagline right intelligent law for innovative business the problem with that is is that we're not going to have protection for just the words Rogers collective we'd have protection for the words Rogers collective intelligent law for innovative business right so if someone else wanted to come along and you know create a brand that was really similar and let's say they wanted to be called smart Drew's collective okay for lack of a better example if they wanted to because it's called something really close to our brand name they would be able to point to those additional words in our trademark application and say that is enough to differentiate smokers collective from Rogers collective intelligent law for innovative business you get what I mean so that is the reason why you can only do one application and get that two-for-one deal where you get protection for both your logo and your company name if you have a logo that only has your company name in it and no other words the other item that you may want to consider when you're deciding whether to register your company name or your logo is are you super committed to this logo or are you the type of person that is gonna want to change your logo every six months or every two years or really rather often right when you register your trademark it is not a super cheap process right it costs money it is an investment in an asset for your business trademark protection is actually something that you only want to invest in if this is something that you are committed to long term so if you're committed to your company name long term then you should go ahead and register that if you are committed to your logo long term then that is something else that you should consider protecting you register your trademarks you have protection for many years to come right so there's no point in registering your logo if you know that you'r

Thanks Refice2 your participation is very much appreciated
- Kymberly Bravata

About the author

Kymberly Bravata

I've studied educational psychology at Langston University in Langston and I am an expert in screenwriting. I usually feel dark. My previous job was elementary school administrator I held this position for 13 years, I love talking about talking and comic books. Huge fan of Rachel McAdams I practice bocce ball and collect bobbleheads.