Copyright

Gareth    Planning    

Having read the various press articles on companies losing their domain names, normally to US companies and especially for .com domains, we decided to trademark the name ‘webtogs’. Whilst our primary motivation was to protect the online name, it’s also good to do for general intellectual property (IP) protection anyway.

It’s an interesting process that we’d never been through before, but rather than hire an ‘expert’ or use our lawyer, we thought we’d try ourselves, in an effort to keep costs down.

It’s actually quite easy. The patent office website is not bad and has lot’s of useful info to help out TM newbies such as us. After a bit of digging we discovered category 35 fits online retail the closest, so we entered that as our designated classification. There’s a good general list of classification categories and their numbers here.

We applied for the name ‘webtogs’ and our logo, which needed to be a certain size and in TIFF format. TIFF has the option to save the RGB colour profile in the image, via Photoshop, so we did this, rather than mess about with pantone colours.

In the end we opted for the online application, which was surprisingly easy to do and only took 10 mins or so. For the princely sum of £200 our application has been recieved and we await the outcome with bated breath .

I think the main concern for us is the term ‘web’ in the company name, which is fairly generic, but we sit in hope!

Here’s the logo file we uploaded as part of the online application…

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