The duly noted® blog

Are titles, names, and logos protected under copyright

Titles, names, logos, phrases and slogans can become intellectual properties, but as trademarks.

Trademarks are identifiers of trading businesses. The best trademarks are instantly recognisable, and help distinguish a business, its products or services from those of its competitors.

Take five seconds now to think of a famous logo or brand name.

Chances are it’s trademarked.

Trademarks like copyrights can be licensed or sold, and really valuable trademarks can earn big money. Consequently, they can be formally registered with a government trade mark office for extra protection from infringement. I’ll go into that in a moment.

Firstly, one solution is to simply use the “TM” symbol against your title/name.

The “TM” mark indicates a trademark and, as you’re probably aware, functions like the “©” copyright symbol, in that it is notice to others that this is a brand, identifiable to the title’s owner, that they’re using it to sell their merchandise, and others shouldn’t try and pass off or sell work/merchandise using that title.

It’s unofficial, and while not carrying the weight of the official “®” symbol you get having registered with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (which we got for our company name duly noted®), it is nevertheless universally recognised. Once you look for it in the everyday world, you’ll notice the TM mark everywhere, for names and logos. We used the TM mark until our formal trademark registration came through.

Next, you can contact the UK Intellectual Property Office (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/) about registering your title/name as a trademark. We advise running an initial search of your title against the various categories. While there’s a charge for this service, it would save you the time and expense of submitting an application at a substantially higher price only to find your preferred title is already taken. You can also do a quick free search on names/text to see if the name is already registered for your category. The Intellectual Property Office team were also very helpful to us when making our application, so you can certainly contact them for more information on this aspect.