Of course utilizing an attorney for your trademark registration is always the safest choice if you have the thousands of dollars to cover the cost. However, I’m willing to bet there are a lot of startups out there that simply can’t afford the added burden to their pocket book. If you’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t afford an attorney this article was written for you and will hopefully provide you with an overview of the entire process of registering a trademark.

Even with the absence of an attorney you still need to be prepared to pay $350.00 – $1,500.00 for the USPTO filing fees. There is a reason the cost can vary so much; it depends on how many classes you need to register. At the time this article was written the fee/charge per class was $325.00 (Please follow the second link below to find the current fee schedule). A class or more specifically classification is used to identify the goods or services that correspond to your trademark/business. Some businesses offer goods or services that can’t be adequately covered by just one class, this is when the costs can really add up. It should also be noted that a trademark can also be considered a service mark depending on the type of business for which the mark is being registered.

Unfortunately, the cost of registering a trademark isn’t the only issue. The fine folks at the USPTO are meticulous with details (for good reason) and offer little room for error. If you make any critical mistakes on your application you may find yourself out of the non-refundable registration/filing fees. Your first step should be to review all of the information USPTO offers on their website. After you feel comfortable with what you’ve reviewed, search their TESS database for similar logos/marks as well as similar names. If there are trademarks that bare similarities I would recommend speaking to an attorney or doing additional research before you continue because this presents additional variables that I did not encounter during my trademark registration.

After you’ve reviewed the information on USPTO.com and made sure there are no similarly registered trademarks, it’s time to do more research. The best advice I can give you is to use the TESS search to find similar businesses and/or websites that have successfully registered their trademarks and review the information they used for their registration. By no means whatsoever am I recommending you copy their information (this would be illegal and more than likely pointless), just use it as a tool to make sure you’re looking in the right direction. I wouldn’t stop with reviewing just one similar businesses trademark, look at several. I would focus on two things while doing your research. First, pay close attention to the writing style of the descriptions keeping an eye out for specific terminology and look at the way the description is phrased; if their trademark was approved they must have done it right. Secondly, you can use similar businesses to help narrow down an appropriate class or classes for your application.

There are two basic formats for trademark registration; standard character and stylized. The standard character format is for the registration of words alone, with no claim to any special font or designs. The standard character format was used when registering, “disagreeing has never been so much fun” – JealousBrother.com’s slogan. The stylized format is what was used for the JealousBrother.com name/logo due to the uniqueness of the logo’s design and the fact that there were special fonts and illustrations claimed as a part of the trademark. The latter is obviously much more difficult to register due to the scrupulous detail required to satisfy the requirements set by the USPTO. If your trademark requires a stylized registration I strongly suggest going the extra mile when writing the description of the mark. In my opinion it is better to cover all of your bases with a lot of detail rather than being too lax with your description leaving room for questions.

If you’re like me then you would probably expect a pretty quick turnaround after forking out hundreds of dollars to register your trademark; think again. I’m sure the USPTO is very busy and the type of data they handle is very detailed and extremely important to many individuals and companies alike. However, I was pretty shocked when I found out the timeline was three to six months before an examining attorney would even look at my application. It took roughly two and a half months for an examining attorney to look at our application. It is also estimated that the entire process from filing to final registration will take between thirteen and sixteen months. When you file without an attorney this can be a pretty painful and worrisome wait; wondering if everything was submitted correctly.

After your application is reviewed by the attorney he/she will give you an approval or denial for the official publication of the USPTO gazette. If approved you will eventually be provided a date your trademark will be published, at which point there will be a waiting period of 30 days. During this time anyone who has reason to oppose the registration of your trademark has the right to contact the USPTO. I guess a good analogy would be speak now or forever hold your peace.

After patiently waiting over five and a half months the day finally came, our logo was published in the official Gazette. If there was one thing I learned up to this point it was that I should never expect anything to happen overnight with the USPTO. Thirty days of patience came and went and so did another two months before I heard anything. I guess I expected the USPTO to throw me a congratulatory party in recognition of my trademarked achievement but they didn’t. Actually, I didn’t even get an email, I found out our trademark had been finalized by checking the status on the USPTO website. Either way it is a good feeling to know 252 days of my life did not go to waste. I did eventually receive a nice certificate of registration from the USPTO which will be framed and placed in my office as a reminder of the completion of this difficult task. I hope this article helps shed some light on what to expect as you embark on a critical yet time consuming journey of registering a trademark.

Ideally, an attorney should handle your trademark registration. Unfortunately money doesn’t grow on trees so your only option may be to register the trademark on your own. Even if you complete this task on your own be prepared to pay between $350.00 – $1,500.00 for the USPTO filing fees. There is a reason the cost can vary so much; it depends on how many classes/categories you need to register. At the time this article was written the fee/charge per class/category was $325.00 (Please follow the second link below to find the current fee schedule). As you can see, at $325.00 registering a trademark can get very pricey. It should also be noted that a trademark can also be considered a service mark depending on the type of business for which the mark is being registered.
USPTO Links:

USPTO Home Page

Fee Schedule

Unfortunately, the cost of registering a trademark isn’t the only roadblock. The fine folks at the USPTO are meticulous with details (for good reason) and offer little room for error. If you make any critical mistakes on your application you may find yourself out of the non-refundable registration fees. Your first step should be to review all the information USPTO offers on their website. After you feel comfortable with what you’ve reviewed, search their tess database for similar logos/marks as well as similar names. If there are trademarks that bare similarities I would recommend speaking to an attorney before you continue.

After you’ve reviewed the information on USPTO.com and made sure there are no similarly registered trademarks, it’s time to do more homework. The best advice I can give you is to find similar businesses and/or websites that have successfully registered their trademarks and review the information they used for their registration. By no means whatsoever am I recommending you copy their information (this would be illegal), just use it as tool to make sure you’re looking in the right direction for the correct class/category as well as what the trademark office is looking for in a description.

There are two basic formats for trademark registration; standard character and stylized. The standard character format is for the registration of words alone, with no claim to any special font or designs. The stylized format is what was used for JealousBrother.com due to the uniqueness of the logos design and the fact that there were special fonts and illustrations claimed as a part of the trademark. The latter is obviously much more difficult to register due to the scrupulous detail required to satisfy the requirements set by the USPTO.

If you’re like me then you would probably expect a pretty quick turnaround after forking out hundreds of dollars to register your trademark; think again. I’m sure the USPTO is very busy and the type of data they handle is very detailed and extremely important to many individuals and companies alike. However, I was pretty shocked when I found out the timeline was three to six months before an examining attorney would even look at my application. It is also estimated that the entire process from filing to final registration will take between thirteen and sixteen months. When you file without an attorney this can be a pretty painful and worrisome wait; wondering if everything was submitted correctly.

After your application is reviewed by the attorney he/she will give you an approval or denial for the official publication of the USPTO gazette. If approved you will eventually be provided a date your trademark will be published. At which point there will be a waiting period of 30 days. During this time anyone who has reason to oppose the registration of your trademark has the right to contact the USPTO. I guess a good analogy would be speak now or forever hold your peace.

More to come…

It is quite possible that your web developer could design a custom logo and if he/she is comfortable doing so then that is likely the best path to take. However, programs like Adobe Illustrator are very complex and creating high quality vector illustrations is truly an art, as is creating websites, so it is easy to understand why a developer could be brilliant in html, php, mysql, etc… and not be a jedi master in illustration. I mentioned vector illustrations for a particular reason; if you’re planning ahead they are a must. Once again I am not an expert but vector images/illustrations can be blown to any size without losing image quality. This would be ideal for billboards, signs, etc… for the future marketing of your website. This is different from jpeg’s and gif’s because to increase the size of those images you actually have to zoom in, which is what causes the picture quality to diminish and what creates the digitizing effect you get.

You may not need a complex logo designed; a basic logo may suit your needs. When trying to decide what to do remember that your logo represents your company/website. The trick is to create a logo that stands out and correctly represents your company/website without being obnoxious or distracting. With JealousBrother.com we faced a couple of issues. First, I wanted our logo to represent where the idea came from for the website, the competition between my brother and me. We opted to have a slightly more distracting logo to keep that personal connection to the idea. Only time will tell if we made the right decision on the logo. If you choose to have your logo designed there are a couple of important things to keep in mind. Make sure you are paying for and receiving full ownership of the completed logo. Some graphic designers/illustrators will try to slip in different types of licenses. Much like the windows operating system discussed earlier, a license is not ownership and will cause some very annoying and costly problems down the road. A license may authorize you to use the logo but the designer remains the owner of the logo. Possessing full ownership of your logo/mark is absolutely mandatory as we progress to the next step of the process; registering your logo/mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

After the WDA had been signed and the details had been thoroughly discussed the developer started work on photo shop comps of the website while I began a new journey; the quest for a server. Being so green when I started this project I actually thought you could successfully run a social network on a shared hosting plan. Well, in theory you could for a short time, but I wasn’t looking to run a website short term. I needed some room for growth and the last thing I wanted was a server to crash after launching.

Shared hosting plans are very affordable and for a small blog are ideal but when you are looking for high amounts of traffic the option isn’t even an option, it’s dedicated. Sadly enough even a dedicated machine won’t keep you online for long if you see rapid growth; at some point load balanced servers will be a necessity. This was probably the biggest jaw dropper for me; how can I afford $200 – $500 a month on a server? Actually the better question is how could I afford not to?

While searching for a quality host to lease a dedicated machine from I noticed a problem, they all seemed to have some negative reviews from former or current customers. It seemed like every time I found a dedicated server at a good price there were a couple of catches, first the bad reviews and second the cost of adding upgrades. Some of these companies are legal rapists, charging you $50 a month to add a hard drive. In twelve months that little hard drive will have cost you $600 on top of the regular cost of the server.

In addition to the already confusing arena of dedicated servers another problem arose, managed or unmanaged? Ideally I’d love to have someone take care of my server for me but not for the additional $100 a month on average it costs. However, if you decide to manage your own be prepared to get lost. Even with Cpanel it is still nearly impossible to manage your own box without extensive knowledge. Cpanel makes life a lot easier but unless you know what you are doing, tasks like recompiling packages are beyond a novice’s reach.

I personally purchased three different books in an attempt to learn the ins and outs of Linux and more specifically L.A.M.P. servers. For those of you who don’t know what L.A.M.P. is, they are the most commonly used servers on the web. L.A.M.P. stands for Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP. I’m not going to pretend to know everything but I will make an effort to explain what each component is. Linux is obviously an operating system as is Microsoft Windows, but that is where the similarities end. Linux is a very powerful platform that allows its users who know what they’re doing to customize it to suit almost any situation. It is also free, it is known as open source which means the source files are available for free with no licensing fees, unlike Microsoft who charges obscene amounts of money for their software and the worst thing is that you are not allowed to modify the source code.

Apache is the actual web server software. I may get slaughtered for saying this but it is basically the software that turns your server, which is no more than a powerful computer, into a computer capable of hosting a website or a multitude of websites. Mysql is an open source database system which is used for many different websites. For a social network in specific it is the storage facility for all information within the site. Whether its user images, user information, or website data, it is stored and can be rapidly accessed using Mysql. PHP is a server side scripting language that is also open source, hence free. PHP determines what is pulled from the database (mysql) and at what point. Unfortunately, providing any more information on L.A.M.P. would be beyond my understanding and would lose the focus of this article. If you would like more information please visit the following websites:

1. http://www.linux.org
2. http://www.apache.org
3. http://www.mysql.com
4. http://www.php.net

Now that some of you are immensely confused let’s carry on. Unless you want to spend the extra money on a windows server, Linux should probably be your choice. When looking for a dedicated server there are some important things to look for. First, you want newer hardware that isn’t obsolete and slow. Then you will need to pay attention to things like uplink speed, bandwidth provided, cost of extra bandwidth, memory, hard drives, raid (hardware or software), cost of extras like remote reboot and control panels, and you’ll even want to find out who provides the host with their bandwidth; some providers are far better than others. I can’t sit here and tell you the exact specifications you’ll need for your server but I can tell you that social networks which are database driven are memory intensive, so the more memory the better.

Your data is your life when it comes to websites so making sure you don’t lose that data is life or death. For me the first line of defense is raid 1 (mirroring). This is the use of two hard drives within the server writing the exact same data. The downfall is that you only have half of your hard drive space usable but the overpowering benefit is that if one of the drives fail, another one can be added with no data loss. Don’t worry, that’s not all there is to it, there are two ways to conduct raid among disk drives, hardware and software. The latter is more affordable but hardware raid will always outperform software but usually costs significantly more.

If your server has enough space within the case you can opt to install a third drive to use solely as a backup drive as a second line of defense. My server did not have the space to take advantage of the third drive so I decided to purchase hard drive space on an ftp account. This is a backup option that allows you to save your website data to a hard drive located somewhere else other than your server. It is important to note that ftp accounts have their limits; due to the time it takes to transmit data over an internet connection it could take days to back up 500gb of data. There is one other downfall to ftp accounts; they consume your bandwidth. Taking things one step further I also have dedicated hard drives on multiple computers to keep backups of our website and I’ll continue to do so until it grows so large it will take too long to download the data.

I’m going to take a couple of steps backwards to explain a certain necessary evil. With websites and social networks in particular there are a lot of legal issues that should be addressed. When I say necessary evil what I really mean is attorneys. They have what you need and without them you’ll be lost. Sure, you could sign up for a website and steal their legal documents, alter them a bit, but then pose the risk for being sued for copyright infringement. This isn’t the only legal risk websites create for their owners; there are countless others.

Before you even think about starting work on the project you need to have access to two very important documents. The first is known as an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) which needs to be signed by anyone you decide to discuss the details of your idea with.

This document makes it illegal for the parties involved to disclose any of the information discussed with any third parties and also protects you against them using your idea or information you provided them on their own. After you’ve found the developer you want to work with the second document is known as a WDA (Web Developing Agreement). In a roundabout way this document lays down the law for what is acceptable use of information, timelines, what’s required for completion, etc… As an example in the WDA I used, it restricts the use of any of the code in future projects and it also requires the developer to hand over all materials involved with the project. I’ll be honest with you, when I read the document over I put myself in the shoes of the developer and it damn near made me tear up.

So you found the developer you’re going to work with, so what other legal issues do you need to be aware of? Don’t worry, there is plenty more to stress about. If you are building a social network you have to worry about several areas. First, age requirements, thirteen and under require explicit parental approval and require a ton of additional measures to make sure the children aren’t presented with inappropriate content. The best policy is to restrict users by requiring them to be at least fourteen years old. This will be one less thing to worry about and don’t worry; they will be fourteen at some point. Another concern is copyright issues pertaining to the content of your website which includes the content added by the users. There is a document called “the prohibited content guidelines” which explains in detail what users are legally allowed to add to the website. By presenting this document, you will release liability from yourself and pass it on to the individual users. However, this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You are required by law or more specifically DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to promptly remove any content that is infringing on another entities intellectual property when a verified entity requests you to do so. The other required documents are the website “terms of use” and “privacy policy.” The purpose of the terms of use document is to explain to the users the purpose of the website as well as what they are allowed to use the website for, and it definitely highlights the restrictions as well. The privacy policy is in place to inform the users how your website will treat their personal information. As an example, a responsible website will not share user’s information with third parties unless it is something that directly correlates with the operation of the website. An example of this would be online advertising; user’s information is shared with companies like Google so more targeted ads can be placed in front of them. An example of an unethical website would be one that sells users’ email addresses to spam companies. The scary thing is you will always have to keep your guard up; lawsuits can surface even on the most legally responsible websites.

Before I go into my hypothesis on scripts I feel it is important to offer a bit of advice. This may seem like a bit of common sense, and really it is, but it could be overlooked: Protect yourself and your intellectual property.

Your idea is yours and yours alone right up until you start spilling the beans to these design firms as you’re attempting to get a quote. Quite frankly, they are the last people you should even mention your idea to; if they were to find out and agreed in the ideas potential, these people could bring it to life without you. When requesting quotes just give the bare necessities, they won’t be able to give you a precise number but it will give you a ball park figure to work with.

I must have spent a solid month looking at different scripts, weighing one against another trying to figure out if it would work for me. The answer is that it could have, but would have ended up costing me a fortune to have it modified to suit my needs, putting efficiency of the website into question. My biggest problem with scripts is they are bloated; much like MySpace they are built with endless features to entice people to purchase the software and when I say purchase I mean license the software. You’ll have to shell out a lot of extra money to receive unconditional use of the script and some companies do not offer that as an option. There is also some open source or more specifically, communities similar to the Linux following that offer source code for free and use the community to continue the progress and development. First, I applaud communities that do this; it is great for people like me with a very limited budget. However, if I had chosen to use one of the free scripts, my lack of knowledge in php, mysql, html, java, etc. would have left me in a bind when it came to being able to modify it to suit my needs.

It became a grim reality that the cost of the main stream web developing firms would stretch far beyond my budget. This left me with a couple of options. First, go overseas (India) for affordable web development solutions. I personally did not feel comfortable doing that for a multitude of reasons but primarily because I wanted to do business with someone who I could eventually meet face to face and I had no intentions on traveling to India. Option two was to search for a freelance developer in the states. I spent countless hours scouring the internet looking for possible developers and began shooting emails out for quotes. I received several responses explaining my project was beyond their current abilities but then I struck gold. I found a developer who had extensive knowledge and a willingness to learn what was needed in order to complete the project.

For me, using a very intelligent freelance web developer came with some benefits; he was willing to hear me out. Even more surprising he contributed more to the creative aspect of the website than I could have ever imagined. We bounced ideas back and forth for weeks, developing a plan of attack and setting priorities for which features should come first and which ones would be considered down the road. What made things even better was that his situation was a perfect fit for my project. He was finishing his final year at college and had a particularly nice living arrangement where he had limited expenses, enabling him to complete the project within my budget.

So you have a great idea for a social network and a great domain name to go with it? If you are new to the wonderful world of the web you might be inclined to think that registering the domain name is half of the battle. It is true that the name of the website is very important and registering it before someone else does will almost guarantee you the ability to use it, assuming you register it with a credible registrar. A great idea can move mountains but without fully bringing that idea to life it is nothing more than a shiny trophy in one’s mind.

I am writing this collage of articles for those who have manifested that great idea for a website, whether it’s a social network or some other complex website. I am currently in the middle of preparing to launch a website which was derived from a clever idea that came out of thin air in the middle of 2006. One of the things I was forced to realize early on was that the information I needed was not in one place, but scattered everywhere. Being a novice, I didn’t always know what I was looking for. I should probably start at the beginning. I am the youngest of three kids, with an older brother who I’ve been competing with for as long as I can remember. My brother and I recently became homeowners and along with that, inherited responsibilities for lawn care. We constantly attempted to outdo one another; he had a better push mower so I got a used riding mower. It didn’t stop there, my lawnmower was ten horse power so he got a used 18.5 horsepower mower only to once again fall to defeat by my 20 horse v-twin; you get the point.

So where did my idea come into play? Out of nowhere as I was leaving one of my boasting messages on my brother’s voice mail I jokingly said, “I posted pictures of my new mower on jealousbrother.com.” The response I got made me realize what had just happened. An idea was born, from the minute family members started asking if that was a real website.

Now that the background is out of the way we can move onto the very lengthy process of turning this idea into reality. The obvious first step for me was to make sure the domain name was available and much to my surprise it was, so I registered jealousbrother.com. I also registered a number of misspelled versions of the domain to protect my investment and to make sure people were redirected to the website even if they misspelled the domain name. One thing I recommend is to make sure you protect your domain. Make sure you keep your information current with the registrar and when you can afford to, extend the registration of your primary domain as far out as you can. Doing so will remove some of the risk for errors causing you to lose your domain to expiration, such as a change in credit card information.