Names are very popular trademarks – trademarking a business name, for example, is commonplace. A business name trademark, however, must be unique and non-obvious. You cannot trademark a name like “Speedy Dry Cleaners” because thousands of dry cleaners already have the same name. Being descriptive of what a good dry cleaner is, it is too generic to be trademarked. Even something like “Cheetah Dry Cleaners” may be too descriptive by association to be eligible for a trademark.

Arbitrary names are often the best candidates for business name trademarking – “Apple” for a computer company, for example. Recall that a trademarked business name applies only to that product area a business operates in – thus someone might open an “Apple Dry Cleaners” business or trademark the name themselves.

Not all phrases need to be – or even should be – trademarked. Typically trademarks are used in places you really want to distinguish your business from another business, and have a phrase that is truly unique. “This is a great product” would not qualify for trademark protection. Also, trademarking a phrase for a limited advertisement campaign that isn’t essential to your brand identity may not be the best use of your resources. But if you plan to make the phrase an integral part of your business, a trademark will prevent competitors from co-opting that phrase or even trademarking your phrase themselves.

So make sure the phrase is unique and effective for your business plan, and determine whether you want your phrase to be trademarked with a stylized or standard character mark. A stylized mark will protect the combination of the words and graphic elements, like typography, while a standard character mark will protect the words in the phrase generally.

Trademark registration takes place through the USPTO (The United States Patent and Trademark Office). The trademark registration process is similar to the patent process and involves a trademark search to determine whether registered trademarks disqualify your trademark idea.

An attorney is not required to register a trademark, but there are many legal deadlines in a typical trademark timeline that an experienced trademark attorney will know how to navigate, and only a registered trademark attorney can guarantee you the most comprehensive trademark search on existing marks and a trademark search analysis that can tell you the likelihood of success in pursuing a trademark application.

Note that you can get limited trademark protection (™) simply by using your mark in connection with selling goods and services through your business, but this only applies to a limited geographical and commercial scope.

To register a trademark for broader trademark protection, you must first:

• Choose your mark and how it will be depicted. A trademark registration can be done in a stylized or standard character form. A stylized mark is a mark that contains style or design elements beyond the trademark itself, like colors, fonts and graphical elements. These elements will be protected as a whole, along with the text. A standard character mark is plain text, without formatting or design. This gives you broad trademark protection of your mark, but doesn’t protect any stylistic elements.
• Choose the nature of goods and/or services you are selling with your mark. A mark is always specific to a certain focus like this, unless multiple trademark applications are filed.
• Choose whether the mark is to be filed under the “intent to use” or “use in commerce” basis – basically, whether you intend to use the mark to sell the specific goods and/or services classifications you are filing under, or if you have already begun to use the mark to sell these goods and/or services.
• Following completion of these steps, a trademark can be filed at the USPTO website at http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/teas/index.jsp

A design is patented slightly differently than other patents as it is not identifying some new function or use of the patent, but rather a new design feature. Thus the application will rely more heavily on diagrams and drawings of the patent in question than other patents might. Unlike other patents, there is only a single claim of the invention – namely, that it has the novel design that the application as a whole claims it does. A specifications and description section of the patent might describe the patent design in more depth, but the pictures are ultimately the greatest proof in the case of design patents.