Trademarking Pingbase
July 13, 2006
It’s time to get on with the legal work on this project.
As I’m sure most of you have, I’ve been keeping up with Ryan’s Barenaked App blog that follows the build of his latest project, Amigo. When it came time to register our trade mark i followed his simple guide.
It really wasn’t a scary a process at all.
At the risk of starting a meme, I documented the event.
We decided to go for the Search and Advisory Service (SAS) to start with. This application lets you do a kind of feasibility test to see what your chances of being successful are. It’s cheaper, which means less risk, but does mean that overall it costs a little more as it’s not deducted from the total cost. This first stage is costing us £94 inc. VAT. If we pass then the next (and final) stage will cost £200 inc. Vat, which covers us for two classes. This is the infamous TM3 form!
Choosing the classes you fit into is not that easy.. Having sent off the form I got a call from the Patent Office in Cardiff asking me a few questions about Pingbase. They were very helpful and we fleshed out the description a bit more. We ended up submitting it, on their advice, without classes. They’ll work that bit out on our behalf. Very nice of them!
On a side note – this is the first piece of paperwork we’ve generated so far. So far everything has been online, in emails or Basecamp. Having this (although we’ve sent it off now) adds some reality to the project.
