Trade Marks

[leftie]

I see the patents office charge £200 to register, but £80 plus VAT to do a search to see if the mark is legal and available.

Has anybody used the search service or would gooogle do a similar job for a TM which is text based?

I have a product I may want to protect, but don't want to pay too much as it is only in its embryonic stages and may be a still birth.

Is it an easy or a tortuous journey?

[aceparts_com]

From what I understand, you can obtain TM simply through use of the mark.

My Patent attorney kept banging on about me TMing my product but it's too early in the day to spend even more money (was going to be about £600 from memory including all his fees).

[PetrolTed]

You do obtain protection through ongoing usage but it's not as strong as actually registering the mark.

It's not expensive, but advice may be. I registered PistonHeads and Speed Matters in about six categories each and the total came to about £1000. However the advice I got didn't cost hard cash as it was from a friend.

You can do it yourself, it's not complicated, but you do need to do some reading to get up to speed on the whole process.

They are a valuable asset of the business if you do get them successfully registered.

[leftie]

Thanks Ted. The PO seems to have quite a few booklets in PDF on their site. I think I will wait until we have the field trials done. I have taken the web name for it already which is half the battle thse days.

[rpguk]

I used the £80 service once before applying to register a couple of trademarks recently. For your money you basically get a sheet of paper saying either it is ok or giving you a reason why it might fail. These seem to be mainly be because the spelling is to similer to another registered mark in the same category.

I think if you've read up on the ins and outs of registering a trademark then you are probably able to assess yourself whether or not the mark is allowed if you aren't sure then your probably better off paying a few quid to a trademark register agent to do it for you as it takes up to 6 months to get turned down and you don't want to get that far into a project only to get an objection to the name.

One thing which pissed me off about the whole thing is that the £80 is to pay for someone to do all the checks to make sure that the application is ok in principle, so surely you should get a discount off the £200 if you submit a full application as the initial part has been completed.