trademarks - Contractor Talk - Professional Construction and Remodeling Forum

King of Crown · 02-13-2007, 03:26 PM

Okay, I am tapped into a connection at a library and it is taking me a minute to download each page I view, so I cant search, because i know it has been brought up before. I need to register some trademarks, and dont want to pay an attorney to do it, so if you guys could give me the link to the government registration I would really appreciate it.

Also your feed back on registering names and logo's would also be a great help.
thanks,
clint overton

Mike Finley · 02-13-2007, 04:15 PM

There are things to know about trademarking, not everything is trademarkable, not everything needs to be trademarked in the way you are considering it.

1st thing to do is register your service mark locally. Do that normally with your secretary of state for probably $10-25. It's usually a very DIYer friendly thing to do.

Unless you do business nationwide and have a unique "whatever" to trademark you can't even trademark it anyways. To do it nationally the 1st step is a national trade mark search. The trade mark attorneys seem to have this search locked up and not accessable to us, so you are usually stuck paying one to help you. A national trademark and a local one are different in complexity. It is probably foolish to even attempt to do a national one by yourself anyways. The stakes are too high and the last thing you want to find out is 5 years from now when you need to enforce it you can't because you didn't establish it correctly from the start.

In short - do the local one yourself and do the national one by paying out $1000-$1500. The local one is the first step to establishing your service mark anyways, so just get it over with.

King of Crown · 02-13-2007, 04:33 PM

easy enough. Thanks.

Grumpy · 02-13-2007, 05:59 PM

www.legalzoom.com

Stone Mountain · 02-13-2007, 09:47 PM

I'm going through this right now. I took out trademarks 12 years ago, under "The Fence & Deck Centre", both the phrase and the logo.
Turns out :
A] change even one letter and you can throw the makr out
B] unless you have a name, like "Steve's Fence & Deck, you can't protect it and even then, there is nothing to stop someone else opeing up "Bob's Fence & Deck centre", if the mark isn't set up properly.
Turns out my lawyer from 16 years ago set it up as a local only. And of course it's too late to go after him (we don't do that sort of thing in Canada anyway)

Now that I'm franchising, the aggravation factor is setting in, and instead of just using my old marks, it's gonna cost me $10,000!

The gist of it is: don't cheat yourself: go to a good legal specialist, pay the money, and be done with it. If you are too cheap to do it right, you don't need the marks or you'll get indefensible ones; but if you feel you need them, you need to spend the money to do it right.
Just my 2 cents

DamionR · 02-15-2007, 07:36 AM

http://www.uspto.gov/