Trademark Services and Registration

Incorporation is simply to form a business or corporation. Under United States law, a corporation is essentially a fictitious person under law, and can own holdings, be taxed, or be sued just as an actual human being can. Corporations can be a number of entities besides simple businesses – non profit organizations, government entities or even governances of new towns and cities can fall under the classification of ‘corporation’.

Like the person a corporation is designed to be, all corporations must also have names. Under corporate law, that name consists of three basic parts: it’s ‘distinctive element,’ it’s ‘descriptive element,’ and it’s legal ending. When combined, these parts form the moniker by which a corporation or business will be legally recorded as. This name will also be the name under which trademark services and registration will take place.

When a new corporation is under construction in the legal processes of the country’s fine legal system, a lot of thought and effort goes into the name. The name of a corporation is the name by which it will be known in general, and goes a long way towards saying what exactly the company is and does. First impressions are important, and often the first impression a possible customer will receive is when he or she reads the name of the corporation in the phone book or on an internet search engine.

As was said previously, there are three parts to a corporate name. The descriptive element is optional, and simply says what the company does – “lawn service” or “technical repair” or “tea pot and ceramics expert”, for example. The distinctive part is the only required part of the legal name, and is usually some word - you could use your own name, for instance, like “Greene’s” or “Smith Brothers” or something similar. You can also use any word, like “Jade” or “Raven” or “Moss Mountain.” You could even make up a word: “Zacka” or “Yahoo,” for instance.

The legal ending describes what sort of business it is – “incorporated,” “corporation,” and “limited” are all examples of legal names, and are abbreviated as “inc.”, “corp.”, and “ltd.”, respectively. Put it all together and you get “Greene’s Lawn Service, inc.”, “Moss Mountain Technical Repair corp.”, and “Zacka Tea Pot and Ceramics Expert, ltd.”. It’s as simple as that.

One basic benefit of incorporation is purely legal: you can use a corporation to protect your personal assets. In a sole proprietor or general partner business, the owner or owners are personally responsible for every business cost, including liabilities and loans. In a corporation, though, stockholders and officers are generally not held liable for their company’s debts and other obligations or liabilities. They’re not held liable for any more than the amount they’ve invested – if a stockholder only invested $500 in a company, he or she cannot possibly lose more than that.

Another benefit of incorporation is that it makes transferal of ownership very easy. If you run a business but aren’t incorporated, selling it will mean selling each individual possession and asset of that company. If you’re incorporated, the corporation owns those assets, so you can sell the entire corporation as a single clean entity without all of the extra hassle and paperwork.

Incorporating businesses has other benefits as well. One of the main ones is taxation – corporations are taxed at lower rates than are other entities (like private individuals or partnerships). They can also own stock in other companies, and can receive corporate dividends at eighty percent tax free rates, making investing and making money off of investing far easier and far more profitable as well. It’s no mistake that some of the wealthiest companies in the united states are incorporated stock broking houses.

Retirement funds are another big advantage of incorporation. Setting up retirement funds like 401k accounts becomes much easier under a corporation or incorporated business – corporations can even count, for instance, paying their owner’s medical assurance as a cost of business, and count it against taxes. Corporations are also durable, and are not affected by the deaths of stockholders or officers, and possess their own credit rating independent of the person who founded the company.

First, anyone wishing to incorporate a new business or company in the United States has to file the Articles of Corporation. These incorporation forms are also called charters, Certificates of Incorporation, or Letters Patent, and list the intended purpose of the corporation, the principle place or location from which it will be operating, and the type of stocks it will be using and selling. There is usually an incorporation form involved with filing incorporation forms, which may range in price from around two hundred dollars to a thousand, depending on the state in which the incorporation takes place. The new corporation must choose a name, as was discussed above, and minor housekeeping details like corporate bylaws must be filed.

In the United Kingdom, the process for incorporation is a little different, and involves filing different kinds of incorporation forms. The process in the United Kingdom is usually called “company formation”. The U K is one of the fastest places in the world for a new company to incorporate, thanks to a fast and efficient national registrar at the Companies House in Britain. The current time record in the U K is a mere five minutes to vet and issue a certificate of incorporation for an electronic application by a company with a “incorporate business online” form.

The internet is, in fact, a great tool for anyone who wants to incorporate his or her new businesses. Online forms and processes makes the entire process fairly quick and hassle free, especially in the United Kingdom. The first step is to find legal help, unless you plan to fill all of the forms yourself. Simply log onto your favorite web search engine and type in “Incorporate business online” and take a look at the listings that come up. There are dozens of companies out there who exist purely to help you get your company up and running with an absolute minimum of hassle and trouble. Legal help like this is also very useful in that consultants and others who may help you incorporate your new business have been in this world for a long time and know all of the ins and outs involved with it, and know how to make sure you get the best deals on incorporation fines, how to best fill out your incorporation forms, and how to make the most of your corporation tax advantages.

If you plan to fill out the forms yourself, check online for “incorporate business online” anyway, as you can probably learn some tips and tricks from the experts just by browsing their websites for free. When you’ve learned enough, get onto the incorporation website for your area and see if an online application form is available. When you’ve found it, just make sure you have all of the appropriate information you need, and then simply fill it out. If you’re not sure of an item on the form, look for a phone number on the web site and give them a call to see what to do next.

If you already have a corporation but need to think about trademarks and registering them, it’s time to start thinking about trademark services and registration. Suppose, for instance, you open a new product line with a great logo or catch phrase, and need to trademark it in order to protect your product from being plagiarized from other, less creative companies. If that’s the case, then you need to find out about trademark services and registration and get your trademark registered as soon as possible. Do a little research first to make sure your phrase or logo really is original, and hasn’t been taken or trademarked already by someone else – plagiarism, even unintentional, is a legal hassle you really do not want to deal with.

Trademark services and registration in the United States are really fairly simple and do not require a lot of effort on the part of the individual or corporation making the registration and submitting the registration forms. Fees are fairly low, although you won’t be able to register for free. Registering a trademark is well worth the trouble and slight fee, though, when your trademark is invincible from being taken by rival companies and used for something inferior to your product – without bringing any actual revenues into your or your company’s pockets.

The simplest way to register a new trademark is simply to go to the U S trademark registration web site and download the required forms you’ll need in order to register your trademark. Trademark services and registration is really rather cheap – usually you can expect to pay around twenty or forty dollars for a single trademark registration. You can even get expedited service if you’re willing to pay a little extra, just to make sure you get your product out on time and ahead of the competition.

If you’d rather not go through all the trouble of registering your trademark yourself, why not think about using one of the dozens of online trademark registration services that exist solely to help you and businessmen and women like you to register trademarks? Simply log onto your favorite web browser right now and run a search for “trademark services and registration.” That will give you the official government sites that let you perform the registration process yourself, and will also bring up a list of dozens of private services which are there to help you perform the registration.

You might want to think about using a private service even if you think you could fill out the registration form without help. The people who do this for a living have seen thousands of these forms in practically every possible configuration, and know about all of the loopholes and flaws in the system your trademark might be victim to if you’re not careful. For the fairly small extra price, it might be well worth it just to make your trademark as strong and unbreakable as possible. If you’re going to be releasing an amazing product, the last thing you want is someone else to take it and then trademark the product under his or her name.

The implication of this are not immediately obvious, but consider this: if another corporation trademarks a product you haven’t, that makes it illegal for you to continue producing that product or using that now trademarked phrase, under United States copyright law. That’s precisely why you have to make sure you trademark your product or phrase first – to keep your hard earned effort and work from falling exclusively in the hands of your competition. If you make sure to educate yourself in the ways the system works, make sure you know the processes involved, make sure you’re on the ball and get your trademark registered as soon as it is possible for you to do so, you’ll be safe on all fronts from all competitors in every marketplace. Preparation has saved more companies than anything else, and simple common sense goes a very, very long way in today’s competitive, hard-edged business world.