Scotland's Source - How to...Trademark a Name

How to...
Trademark a Name

Before I started my business, I never looked into how to trademark a name. Although I had wanted to start a business for years, I have never looked into this particular aspect of it. I had always assumed that it would be very easy. Why would it be difficult to register a name? In this day and age, you would expect it to be easy to do a name registration search. I had imagined that there would be some giant national database with all of the trademarks, copyrights, and other forms of federal and international registration already recorded. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed. It is much more difficult than I thought to register a name. Learning how to trademark a name requires at least a couple hundred dollars, and quite a bit of time as well.

You see, before you get into the meat of how to trademark a name, you have to search to make sure that no one else is already using it. This is much more difficult than it should be. There is, in fact, no national or international registration with a reliable record of all the names held under copyright or trademark – at least none that I was able to find. There are all kinds of organizations that specializes in doing trademark records searches, but all of them cost money and take time. The worst part of it is that, if it turns out that you picked a trademarked name and you find out that it has are ready been taken, You have to start over again. You will have to pick a completely new name and do a completely new search.

In the end, there is no point in learning how to trademark a name unless you stand to gain considerable financial profit from it. A lot of people think that they can not do business unless they trademark a name, but in fact this is not the case. Often, just proving that you used the name first is enough. Intellectual property laws do not require that you trademark your name to be able to make money off your business. There are many businesses that never trademark names and that do quite well for themselves. Don't get me wrong – it can be nice to be able to put the trademark symbol in front of your corporate name, but it is far from necessary unless you are doing business on a regional or national basis.
Once you get to that point, it starts to make sense, but not before that.

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