Help with Trademarks and Copyrights

**JazzyJay** · 11-16-2007 02:09 PM

I'm currently in the process of creating a magazine and I would like to trade mark a logo as well as copyright the name of my magazine(as well as how do I research if the name I want is already taken?), How does someone who is completely naive about this subject get started?

**BusinessAdviser** · 11-16-2007 02:18 PM

Check out the website for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). You'll be trademarking the name, not copyrighting it. If you have a logo developed already, you'll trademark that. It's going to cost you a couple hundred bucks. Make sure you do a good search to make sure it's not already trademarked (and do search elsewhere too, not just the USPTO records). Also, make sure that your name is even trademarkable. We filed ours a couple months ago. Your magazine's copyright is created as soon as you write it down on paper. For example, Men's Health doesn't register their copyright with every magazine they right, but if someone violates their copyright, they can still sue.

**JazzyJay** · 11-16-2007 03:25 PM

Jmeng thanks for the information its everything I was looking for.

**consumertreehouse** · 11-16-2007 04:48 PM

If you are still having questions about how this is done, retain a lawyer to help. I have trademarked and copyrighted several things over the last couple of years, always using the same lawyer, just so things are done the same way.

I was told by one of my professors in college, she has written several books and writes for a few magazines, that an easy way to protect your ideas and if money is short, is to mail everything that you want to protect to yourself. By doing this the Post Office stamps the parcel with the date and year, which is a legal government stamp. You never open the package, just hold onto you. The theory is, with the government issued stamp and if the parcel is never opened, your projects will be protected in a court of law if you were ever to go to court about anything that is similar to your idea, etc....because the stamped date on the package will show that you are the creator of anything that is inside.

I have done this with everything that I have ever written or designed, just as a back up, even though I use a lawyer now for all my trademarking and copyrighting.

You can also get a stamp made with your initials, the year, and the copyright symbol and stamp each page before you seal it up in the parcel and mail it yourself.

Hope this helped you a little.

**BusinessAdviser** · 11-16-2007 05:03 PM

Originally Posted by consumertreehouse

If you are still having questions about how this is done, retain a lawyer to help. I have trademarked and copyrighted several things over the last couple of years, always using the same lawyer, just so things are done the same way.

I was told by one of my professors in college, she has written several books and writes for a few magazines, that an easy way to protect your ideas and if money is short, is to mail everything that you want to protect to yourself. By doing this the Post Office stamps the parcel with the date and year, which is a legal government stamp. You never open the package, just hold onto you. The theory is, with the government issued stamp and if the parcel is never opened, your projects will be protected in a court of law if you were ever to go to court about anything that is similar to your idea, etc....because the stamped date on the package will show that you are the creator of anything that is inside.

I have done this with everything that I have ever written or designed, just as a back up, even though I use a lawyer now for all my trademarking and copyrighting.

You can also get a stamp made with your initials, the year, and the copyright symbol and stamp each page before you seal it up in the parcel and mail it yourself.

Hope this helped you a little.

That's great to show a date by when you created the copyrightable work or trademark. However, that only protects you from someone copyrighting your work and then claiming that it was YOU who copyrighted THEIR work.

To show that this is bad advice, let me present a situation. You create a trademark or copyrighted work and mail it to yourself. You don't do anything with it for a bit. In the meantime, a few months later, you're browsing the web and see that someone else has the SAME gosh darn symbol and is using it as their trademark. Even though you created it first, because they created it INDEPENDENTLY of yours and had no reason to know of yours (as well as several other factors), you have no recourse.

Now, let's say you filed the trademark and the copyrighted work. Even if they do not have actual knowledge of that, the fact that yours is registered with the Office, they should have known of it, and as a result will likely be deemed to have violated your trademark or copyright.

The advice to hire an attorney is wonderful advice. Simply mailing it to yourself, on the other hand, is very poor advice. It's an extra precaution that you should take to protect yourself as much as possible. Good luck.