3 Ways to Save When Registering Your Trademark

                                                                                     Image Credit: opensource.com via Flickr

Trademark registrations can be an expensive proposition for business owners. Last year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office collected $137.7 million in revenue for trademark-related filing fees and services. Jaia Thomas, a sports and entertainment attorney specializing in transactional and intellectual property matters, write about three ways to save when registering a trademark:

Apply online: You can file an online application which costs $275 as compared to a paper application of $375. Because of the lower costs, more and more people are filing online. Of the over 100,000 trademark applications filed in the first quarter of this year, only 637 were paper ones.

Limit the number of goods and services: Applicants are required to specify the goods and services that the trademark will protect. Remember, the filing fee is set per good or per service. If you register for just one good/service, you pay $275 but it will jump to $2,750 for 10 goods/services. Think strategically about your products and limit yourself before haphazardly listing too many items.

Use the trademark: According to law, applicants need to demonstrate the use of trademark in interstate commerce prior to receiving trademark registration. The interstate commerce requirement is fulfilled when the applicant uses the mark on goods that have been sold and transported across state lines or sells services to customers in other states or countries.

If you have not yet used the mark in interstate commerce but have plans to do so, the trademark office will allow for filing an application on an “intent-to-use” basis. Additional fees will accrue with this type of filing. With such a designation, additional filing fees must be paid once the mark is used in interstate commerce. If you are in no hurry to file the application, you should wait until you start using it in interstate commerce.

For more information, please visit: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232764

Thanks for reading, and until next time… stay WISE!