Can i trademark my surname uk [Expert Advice]

Last updated : Aug 15, 2022

Can surname be trademarked?

Under the US Trademark Law, a trademark that is used mainly as a surname cannot be registered without proof that the mark has acquired distinctiveness through use.

Can surname alone be trademarked?

Initially, make sure that your trademark fulfills all the legal requisites for trademark registration. Also, the trademark must be sufficiently distinctive to be protectable and registrable with the national as well as foreign trademark offices. AVOID SURNAMES- Surnames alone cannot be registered as trademarks.

How much does it cost to trademark a name UK?

It costs £170 to register a single trade mark in one class. It costs £50 for each additional class if you pay up front. If you're making a series application the first 2 versions of the trade mark are included in the fee. You then pay £50 for each additional version of your trade mark, up to a maximum total of 6.

How much does it cost to trademark your last name?

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).

Can I use my last name for a business?

For a family business, it's not unusual to put the family name as part of, or the entire, brand name. A surname can serve as the trademark, or brand, if it identifies – and distinguishes – the source of the product or service; but it also must not infringe on an existing user's mark.

Can I use TM for my name?

If the name is a personal name you may use it a trademark, as long as a namesake does not beat you to the punch, meaning that your proposed personal name would not cause a likelihood of confusion with a similar name already in use for related goods or services.

How do you trademark a surname?

Primarily a surname Until then, surname marks can only be listed on the Supplemental Register. To register a mark that consists primarily of the surname of a living person (assuming the mark has acquired secondary meaning), the mark owner must have the namesake's written permission to register the mark.

Can you sue a company for using your last name?

If you discover that another business or person is using your business name, you can file a civil lawsuit against that business or person. In the lawsuit, you must show that you have used the trademark in commerce.

What names can you trademark?

A phrase, word, symbol, device, or even a color are all eligible for a trademark. Anything that distinguishes the goods of your party or company from another qualifies. However, the item must be used in a commercial setting to obtain protection from the law.

How long does UK trademark last?

Trade marks must be renewed every 10 years. You can renew a trade mark in the 6 months before it expires and up to 6 months afterwards.

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.

Can you trademark a name without a business?

You can't register a trademark for non-business purposes. You can only trademark a brand name that you're using in business or that you intend to use in business in the near future.

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 do 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. The benefit of relying on common law trademark rights is that it's free, and you don't need to do any specific work filling out forms, etc.

How do you know if a name is trademarked?

You can search for federally registered trademarks by using the free trademark database on the USPTO's website. To start, go to the USPTO's Trademark Electronic Business Center and choose "Search trademarks." Then follow the instructions you see on the screen. Check state trademark databases.

Should I name my company after myself?

Including your own name in your business' brand creates a personal identity that resonates with customers and clients. “I am the person who my clients work with from meeting to wedding day to final delivery of finished products, so it is me who my clients associate my business with the most.

Can I keep my maiden name professionally only?

Keep your surname. Pros: You don't have to go through the name change process and it won't affect you professionally. In fact, if you've already established your career, keeping your name supports your well-known reputation. Cons: Certain situations may require you to prove your marriage is legitimate.

Can I use my maiden name for my business?

You can use any name you like, but consider your goal. Many professionals continue to use their maiden name, if it is established. Consider it your 'business name'.

Is it better to trademark or copyright a name?

A trademark can protect your name and logo in case someone else wants to use them for their own purposes. Also, you cannot really copyright a name, since copyright protects artistic works. This is exactly why you need to have a trademark that protects your company's intellectual property, such as your logo.

What happens if you trademark your name?

Registering a trademark entitles the owner to exclusive rights to use the name in connection with the class of goods or services for which the name is registered, and and makes it clear who the owner of the name actually is—all on a national level.

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registration certificate please find enclose your trademark registration certificate for your trademark detailed above hey everyone thank you so much for clicking yet another video and welcome if you're new my name is teddy g and this channel is all about me taking you guys along for the journey with me as i build this cloning brand if you're new here please guys consider subscribing i upload videos twice weekly and i'm actually relatively consistent so please consider subscribing so i have a business mentor and when my mentor first came across my brand and its name the first thing he said to me was make sure you get that name and that logo trademarked and so i did and i did it successfully by myself no legal experience no experience in trademarking whatsoever i just went on the gov website and i did it myself and in this video i'm going to be talking to you guys about how i did that the process and all that kind of jazz so let's get into it so i trademarked my brand name and its logo using the gov website there's a whole host of things on that website it's a massive website and on there as well you can trademark and protect your intellectual property and it was a relatively simple process that i feel like anyone could do and for those of you that may not know what trademarking is it's basically a process that you can do in order to protect your intellectual property so you can protect the name of your brand you can protect your logos you can protect certain kinds of patents that sort of things so that's what trademarking is as a whole it cost me 170 pounds to do at the time which is pretty expensive especially when you're starting out but it's worth it in my opinion but i'm gonna touch on that later so the first thing i did when i wanted to actually trademark my brand name is i went onto the golf website and i searched to see whether there was any brands or companies out there that had a similar name especially in a similar class to the one that i was about to trademark in so on the golf website you can actually like see a whole database of all the different names and logos that have been registered for a trademark in the uk or have been attempted to be registered so when i made my search i searched over all the classes and a class is basically a description or scope of the goods or services that you're looking to trademark so for example class 25 is clothing so clothing headwear and footwear so when i did search over all the classes one trademark did actually come up and it did rattle me a little bit because i didn't understand why it came out because it didn't have anything similar to anything that i wanted to do and it was under the class of fitness and body cellulite and fitness gym or something along those lines and the company was actually based in france so this did rattle me a bit because i was thinking oh my gosh like why has this come up is the name similar i didn't quite understand but still i was like you know what i'm just gonna go ahead and do a bit more research and look into actually trademarking my brand name anyway despite the fact that something did actually come up the next thing i did was i got a little bit nosy so obviously i'm aware of a lot of different brands especially small brands from instagram from doing pop-ups and stuff like that and i actually went on there and i researched all those small brands to see whether they had actually trademarked their buy logo logo you know their band logo or their like brand name and quite a few that i knew came up and they had registered and all was scared and i was like oh my gosh so this is actually a thing that people do like i thought i was going in there just being you know like all like what i mean not knowing that this is actually a thing that most brands do but what then triggered my next line of research is when i researched one particular brand they had registered for a trademark but he had been rejected and i didn't even know like things like that could happen and i didn't know that on the database you will be able to see what trademarks have been rejected what trademarks have been submitted and withdrawn all of it stays on this public database so when i saw that that particular brand had been rejected it sparked me to do a bit more research into why trademarks get rejected because i was like i don't want to spend 170 pounds for my trademark to be rejected and i know that that 170 is non-refundable so that's the price of the application like once you make that application that money is gone it's gone i also wanted to make sure that what i was trademarking wasn't gonna potentially commit any of these offenses that might not let it qualify for trademarking so upon my research i'm gonna share with you guys some of the things that may potentially get a trademark rejected so obviously like the bait one would be if your trademark is too similar to another thing that's trademarked so that's the bait one obviously you can't trademark something that's already been trademarked you can't trademark something that isn't distinctive so it doesn't have a distinctive word it doesn't have a distinctive logo but i feel like this is a little bit ambiguous because what is distinctive so that is another reason why your trademark could get rejected and also you can't trademark something that would be in the best interest of the public to be able to use and i'm guessing this would be something along the lines of like you could trademark clothing for example because a lot of clothing brands call their clothing brand like the name of their brand and then clothing so then if you trademark clothing it means those people can't use clothing i believe that's what they mean by you can't trademark things that are in the best interest of the public to be able to use and also you can't trademark things that are too generic again really ambiguous but that's one of the things that came up when i done my research after i carried out that research i was pretty confident that my brand name and logo didn't commit any of these offenses so i did decide to proceed and go on so i know for a fact that if you're looking to trademark anything make sure you carry out as much research as possible especially if you're looking to do it yourself so once i was happy and i felt like i had enough information i went ahead and processed my application to register the name of my brand and two logos and i registered it under two classes so obviously the clothing class and i can't actually remember the other class i registered it under but you know it made sense to me why i registered it under another class as well so i completed the application in august of 2018 and typically it takes about four months or three to four months for them to review your application and in this time people can come along and like contest it so after going through that entire process my trademark was and the correct term is filed registered it was put on the register in november of 2018 so that was approximately three months so it took about three months for my trademark to be accepted and i've got this like thick thick like letter with al

Thanks for your comment Lloyd Mould, have a nice day.
- Nellie Lothspeich, Staff Member

in this video i'm going to show you step by step how you can register a uk trademark for your brand in under 10 minutes so without further ado let's get straight into it okay so if you want to apply for a trademark there's really two main options the first option is to hire an agency or a lawyer to do the trademark application for you and if you go down that route what the agency or lawyer will do is firstly they will do their own research to find out if there's any other companies out there that already have a trademark for a brand name that's the same or similar to yours and the reason why they need to do that is they want to make sure that your trademark application won't get rejected by the ipo or won't be contested by another company when it's published in the trademarked journal which i'll talk about a little bit more later on in the video once they've done their research and they're happy that the trademark will be accepted by the ipo and won't be contested then the lawyer or the agency will then actually go ahead and register your trademark the second option is that you can do all of this on your own and if you do it on your own it's going to cost you about half as much it's super simple to do and that's the route i'd recommend most of you watching this going down so i'm going to show you exactly how to do that in this video so step number one is to do a trademark search to make sure that there's no companies out there that already have a registered trademark for the brand name you're trying to register so what you need to do is just google trademark search and then come down to this search for a trademark and make sure it's the gov dot uk website what i'll also do is i'll links i'll put links to everything i talk about in this video down in the description then you want to select search by keyword phrase or image then you don't want to play around with any of these settings leave these settings exactly as they are all you want to do is just enter the brand name that you want to register in this search word section here so for this example i'm going to pretend that i own a brand called tech lab that sells laptop stands so once you've put that search word in there all you need to do is just click search and then you'll be shown all of the results for matching um matching registered trademarks and similar trademarks okay so ideally in this situation what you want to see here is that there are no trademarks where the marked text the actual brand name of the trademark exactly matches your brand name in this situation you can see there is so this is not ideal but if you find that there is what you need to do is just click into the trademark number and then click on lists of goods and services and what you'll see is all of the classes that this trademark is registered under so the way that trademarks work is that when you register for a trademark you have to pick a specific class so if you have a registered trademark it doesn't mean that there are no other companies out there that can sell products under that brand name it just means there are no other companies out there that can sell products under that brand brand name for a specific class a specific type of product that you're registered in so what you want to do is look at these classes and make sure that none of these fall into the same class that you want to register your trademark in so if we have a look at this example none of these none of these classes are the same classes that i would want to register tech lab in because none of them are the classes that laptop stands or computer equipment would fall into so in this situation i will my trademark would probably go through however because there is a company with exactly the same trademark already registered out there this is a prime example of when i would you would maybe want to then use a lawyer or an agency if in the search results there are no matching trademarks that exactly match your brand name you're good to go and you can move on to step two which is actually registering for the trademark so if you google register a trademark and come down to apply to register a trademark again make sure it's the gov dot uk website again i'll link it down in the description as well you then want to click start your application then scroll down and just click apply now then you're going to be you're going to be given two options it's asking you whether you are applying for this trademark as the trademark owner or authorized person within the business or as an attorney solicitor in-house trademark department or third party representative if a lawyer or an agency was applying on your behalf they would select this option but if you are applying directly you want to select that you are the trademark owner and then click continue the ipo is then going to ask if you're sure you're ready to apply we've already done these steps so just click continue to apply for a trademark then on this page what you want to do is click add name and address details and then all you need to do here is just fill in all the details about you or your business so firstly you want to select owner type if you are a limited company and you want to register the trademark under a limited company or an llp which stands for limited liability partnership then you want to select registered company if you were just an individual person so you're a sole trader or you're an individual and you want to register this trademark under your personal name then you need to click individual in this example i'm going to select registered company then what you want to do is enter in your company details your company address your contact phone number and then finally your email address once you've done all of that you then just need to select these three boxes so the first box says i understand that the ipo will use my email address for correspondence number two i understand that the name and address details will be published now what this means is that once your trademark has either been accepted or rejected by the ipo they will then register your trademark or publish your trademark in the trademark journal for two months to allow any other company to contest your trademark application when they publish your um your trademark application inside the journal they will also publish your name and address and this will either be your business address or personal address depending on what option you select here and what information you provide finally i confirm that this owner is entitled to hold property just select yes for that and then click continue then on this page you need to tell the ipo what type of trademark you're trying to register if you are trying to trademark a specific design of a logo then you want to select one of these two options however if you were just trying to trademark a specific brand name like tech lab for example then you want to select this top option for most of you watching you're going to want to select this top option if you are applying for a trademark so that you can register for amazon's brand registry then you definitely want to select this top optio

Thanks storouxursokeF your participation is very much appreciated
- Nellie Lothspeich

About the author

Nellie Lothspeich

I've studied symbolic interactionism at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon and I am an expert in analytical chemistry. I usually feel blank. My previous job was gluing machine operators I held this position for 20 years, I love talking about skateboarding and volar. Huge fan of Dr. Seuss I practice gymnastics: artistic and collect swarovski figurines.