Legal Question in Business Law in New York

Re: Trademarking a name

You can name your company/product after anything you want as long as you don't infringe the rights of others.

If you name your bath-products company GRILLS BATH PRODUCTS (for example), GRILLS could be an excellent mark for a bath products company -- this is what's called "arbitrary" usage and arbitrary marks are the second most powerful trademarks in existence in the US. APPLE Computer is a fine example of an arbitrary mark. The word apple exists in the language, but an apple grows on a tree and has no RAM or ROM or CD-drive or hard-drive or gigabytes or ports...you get the idea. Same with GRILLS; in normal English, you use a grill to cook on, not to take a bath with.

FYI, the most powerful trademark is a "fanciful" mark; make up a word that does not exist in a language and use that. Xerox. Exxon. Kodak. All fanciful marks. Cellophane. Escalator. Aspirin. All one-time fanciful marks where the trademark value was lost because the mark's owners did not keep the usage solely as a trademark but allowed the made-up word to come to mean the thing. So be careful once you have the mark!

If you name your company after yourself using your last name, you'll have trouble registering the mark (although NY (for corps, LLC/LLPs and partnerships) and each county (for a d/b/a) will allow registration of the entity -- formation, not trademark -- if there is not another name substantially identical to yours on their records, and the state will not search each county's records, nor each county the state's). Human names are difficult to register as trademarks, since all bearers of the name have the right to use their own name. Thus, "John Smith" would be very difficult to register as a trademark, although after a time -- at least five years of continuous use in commerce _and_ demonstration that the name has come to denote your particular goods/services -- it can be done as long as the definition of use is very, very, extremely limited.

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND IS NOT INTENDED, NOR SHOULD IT BE CONSTRUED, AS LEGAL ADVICE. THIS POSTING DOES NOT CREATE ANY ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US. FOR SPECIFIC ADVICE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR SITUATION, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.

Re: Trademarking a name

The previous answer is a good primer on trademarks, to which I'd only add that no good opinion can be offered on the registrability of a mark without a careful search of all existing trademarks.

Re: Trademarking a name

...and as long as you don't use the name in the same trademark class(es) as those where the bigger company uses the name, you're free to give your company the same name as theirs. Expect scrutiny of your activities from them, though, to make sure you're not in their marketplace.

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND IS NOT INTENDED, NOR SHOULD IT BE CONSTRUED, AS LEGAL ADVICE. THIS POSTING DOES NOT CREATE ANY ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US. FOR SPECIFIC ADVICE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR SITUATION, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.

Re: Trademarking a name

As noted by the previous members submissions, your major concern is not whether you can name the product after yurself or your company, but whether the name is violative of any existing marks... this is easily searched on the USPTO website (US patent & trademark office)...

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Re: Trademarking a name

Mr. Gonzalez is on the right track, but he did not mention the most difficult and time-consuming part of a thorough trademark search: the search of all the state trademark databases! This MUST be done to assure the mark doesn't infringe the rights of others in the US. If the mark is to be used internationally, then you open up a whole other can of worms, making sure (a) the mark doesn't exist in any country wherein the mark will be used AND (b) making sure the mark does not offend the morals of another country/culture where the mark will be used.

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND IS NOT INTENDED, NOR SHOULD IT BE CONSTRUED, AS LEGAL ADVICE. THIS POSTING DOES NOT CREATE ANY ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US. FOR SPECIFIC ADVICE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR SITUATION, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.