Trademarks, Copyrights & Intellectual Property
The Law Offices of David M. Zeligs files, prosecutes and obtains trademark and copyright registrations for its clients in the United States and many other countries. We assist clients in the selection and protection of trademarks and copyrights, and the establishment of in-house systems for trademark and copyright protection and renewal. We are also experienced in the preparation of trade secret, confidentiality, licensing and non-disclosure agreements.
- The “building blocks” of your intellectual property “Portfolio” start with the following elements, all of which need to be coordinated with one another to form a coherent identity for your business venture that you can protect from infringement:
- The Name of your Corporation, LLC or other Entity – These names are screened by the state in which you form your entity and must be approved by the relevant government agency before you can obtain the right to use your name of choice. We will check and confirm the availability of your desired business name before you go to the expense of paying any filing fees. Services also include obtaining Fictitious Business Names (DBA’s) when necessary.
- Trademarks Identifying your Product or Service – You can’t trademark the name of a company because a trademark is a name that identifies only a specific product or service, not the name of a business. What you can do, is choose a trademark for your product or service that has the same or a similar name as your company (for example “The Coca-Cola Company”) to provide indirect protection for your company’s name.
The Name of your Company’s Website – In today’s cyber-driven age, you must be able to obtain and protect the website address for your business (the “URL”). We can advise you on this process, and also make sure your URL and trademarks support one another as much as possible. Your ownership of a URL may be vulnerable to attack by the from trademark owners claiming the name of your website is the same or confusingly similar to his trademark name. Disputes over these rights often result in complex and expensive lawsuits in federal court. They need to be avoided for your business to succeed. We have seen many promising start-up companies brought down by their failure to deal with these issues.
Our firm can help you build your Intellectual Property “Portfolio” from the ground up, so you have a solid legal foundation on which to grow and expand your business. We also assist our clients to protect their high technology assets and proprietary information through strategic licensing and joint venture agreements and have developed particular knowledge of products, services and related technologies in the medical, environmental, computer and food industries.