Quote: "... have you actually payed for a trademark and payed the fees to start a business?
.....If I paid around $1,000 for a TM, I would not be very happy with people who simply write a "TM" after their work.
......95% of the people on these forums who mention a "business" and "trademarks" are only BSing!
"
Interesting topic - I recently did a bit of research into trademarks before setting up my website, to make sure that a)I'm not infringing anyone else and b)nobody else infringes me. So, not wishing to be argumentative at all, but these are two useful facts that I found:
1. You don't have to pay to register a trademark in order to own it. The same goes for all intellectual property, whether it's a trade name, a scientific paper or a piece of music. So long as you haven't signed your rights away to another party, you own the copyright because you created it, and you are protected under commomlaw against infringement.
2. The reason people pay to have their trademarks / copyrights / patents registered is not so they have legal rights to it - they have that already. It is so that if the rights are infringed, it is much easier for them to prove they owned it first.
Most of the people on these forums don't have the need to register their trade marks. When they start making big sums of money from their ventures, and they feel that their trademark is an important part of their profitability, then they would probably want to get it registered. By the way, the TM symbol simply means that it is your trademark. The R symbol signifies that it is a registered trademark. Anyone can use the former so long as it belongs to them. You can only use the latter if it is registered.
