Protect Your Brand for an Affordable Flat Fee

A trademark is a word, name, symbol or design that identifies the source of goods or services and tells customers your product is yours rather than someone else’s. It protects your brand. It does not protect an invention, and it does not protect the words you write.

No. Common-law rights arise from use alone. But they are limited to the goods you actually sell and the area where you sell them, and enforcing them means proving your own history with evidence. A federal registration gives you a nationwide presumption of ownership, a date on the public record, and a document you can put in front of a marketplace, a customs officer or an opposing lawyer without proving anything first.

Commonly around a year to eighteen months from filing to registration when nothing goes wrong. An office action, an opposition, or an intent-to-use application waiting on proof of use all add time.

A trademark protects the name, logo or other signal that tells customers who made something. A patent protects the invention itself. Different filings, different law, different rights, and most businesses that need one eventually need the other.

Often yes, if the name identifies the source of your goods or services and is not merely descriptive of them. Registering a business name with your state is not a trademark and gives you no trademark rights.

It looks for earlier marks that could block your application or expose you to an infringement claim. Finding a conflict before you file costs a fraction of finding it after you have printed packaging, built a website and started advertising.

It can, as long as you keep using it and keep filing the maintenance documents. A Section 8 declaration falls between the fifth and sixth anniversaries of registration, a combined Section 8 and 9 renewal between the ninth and tenth, then every ten years after that. Miss one and the registration is cancelled.

No. A domain registration is a contract with a registrar for an address. It confers no trademark rights, and it will not let you stop anyone else from using the name.

An office action is a letter from the examining attorney refusing or questioning your application. A large share of applications get at least one. It carries a deadline, and missing that deadline abandons the application. Many refusals are answerable. Some are telling you the mark was never going to register, which is information worth having early.

Yes. An intent-to-use application holds your priority date while you get to market. You still have to prove actual use in commerce before it registers, and that deadline is real: an application that never gets its statement of use filed simply dies.

Only after the USPTO has issued your registration. Using it earlier is improper. Before registration you can use TM for goods or SM for services, whether or not you have an application on file.