Your Trademarks and Copyrights: 6 Cheap and Easy Ways to Protect Your Stuff
October 17, 2008 by Elizabeth Potts Weinstein
Your business has value and makes money primarily due to its intellectual property, including your trademarks and copyrights. I don’t care if you cut hair, write copy, manage money, clean houses, create websites, sell insurance, sell t-shirts, coach executives, or manufacture computers; what you actually are marketing and selling are ideas.
To be able to charge more money than your competitors and to build value in your business, you must protect your those ideas using the various methods of protecting intellectual property, including filing formal trademark applications and registering your copyrights.
But, that can all get pretty expensive and time consuming. So here are 6 ways you can protect your valuable property without breaking the bank.
Choose Valuable Names.
When you are choosing the name of your business, products, or service, you want to choose names that are distinctive to the public, easy to protect, and have inherent value. The more unique and less descriptive the name, the more distinctive and easy it will be to protect. For example, Amazon.com is a random word to use to describe a bookstore, and is memorable simply because it is so random. When you are choosing a name, brainstorm some names and check their availability by performing Google searches, checking the “who is” database of domain names, and the trademark registry at uspto.gov. You want something that is not already in use, would be easy to remember and spell, and is distinctive in the mind of the consumer.
Protect Your Big Ideas, Not Every Name
The first name of my financial planning business was Potts Weinstein Financial Consulting. I didn’t even bother filing a trademark application for that name, since it was descriptive of my business (my name and what I do), and not very valuable.
My new financial planning business name, The Wealth Spa™ is easy to remember and spell, distinctive, and much more valuable. As such, I protect that name by using the ™ symbol, police it using Google Alerts, and have filed an application to obtain a trademark registration.
Register Domain Names.
It costs $10/year or less to register a domain name. If you have a short list of business, product, and service names, go ahead and register the .com names for all of them. For your main business name, and any valuable Big Idea names, register misspellings and other top level domains (.net, .org, .biz). If you are out of the U.S., or plan to do much of your business in other countries, register both the top level domain for that country (such as .uk) and the .com domain. Also, register your full name (elizabethpottsweinstein.com), if it is available.
Label Your Copyrights.
For the words or symbols you are using in conjunction with your product or service, label them with a ™ symbol to let the world know you are claiming common law (state law) trademark protection. For your creative works (writings, recordings, video), label them with the copyright symbol, the date, and your name — © 2007 Elizabeth Potts Weinstein. On confidential documents (like your client list or internal process descriptions), label them with Confidential, Not for Distribution, or a similar warning. Just these simple acts will let the world know you are planning to police your property, and will keep casual and uninformed people away (similar to locking your car doors).
In some countries, copyright and trademark rights only apply to the first person who officially registers. If you are located outside the U.S., you must review the rules for your country to learn if you need to register ASAP so you don’t loose your rights.
Keep Trade Secrets, Secret.
You may have valuable information that is valuable simply because you keep it confidential, like your client list, your marketing system, or your internal process for creating your products or services. Take simple measures to keep these items secret, by using locked file cabinets, firewalls on your computer, only using secure wireless internet, and not leaving documents on your desk for the cleaning people to read.
Police Your Intellectual Property Assets.
Set up Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) for any words or phrases that are part of your Big Ideas. Google Alerts will automatically perform a web search for those words each day and will notify you when someone uses the words on the web. This includes the name of your business, products, and services, your tag line, the titles of your articles, E-books, and programs, and distinctive phrases you use in your teachings. Whenever someone uses your words on the internet (and the site is indexed by Google), you will know.
Don’t Make Your Trademark Word a Verb.
Don’t use your trademark as a verb or to describe the class of product or service. For example, instead of Xerox-ing a document, say “make a Xerox copy.” You don’t want your trademark to become a generic term for performing that task, or for that class of products. For example, the trademark over the word aspirin in the United States died because the company who owned it (Bayer, then Sterling Drug) used it as a replacement word for acetylsalicylic acid. Tylenol however is careful to use the trademark Tylenol to be their brand, and not another word for acetaminophen (n-acetyl-p-aminophenol). They sell Tylenol brand acetaminophen. The companies who owned Pilates and Montessori both lost their trademarks under similar circumstances. Other examples of brands that came dangerously close to becoming generic and losing trademark protection include Kleenex and Band-Aid. That’s why the kids in Band-Aid commercials now sing “I am stuck on Band-Aid brand” instead of “I’m stuck on Band-Aids.”
The Wealth Spa Minute: Set some Google Alerts on your name, your business name, the names of your products or services, and the names of your most valuable articles, posts, or e-books.
Photo courtesy Ioan Samell via Flickr.
Tags: books, copyright, domain name, google alerts, Intellectual Property, protecting intellectual property, trade secret, trademark, trademarks and copyrights
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