Trademark registration for dummies?

[Sehiro]

Greetings, I am pretty ignorant and have no idea how a trademark is registered.
I tried to look on the web for general tips, but couldn't find much. I may have searched in the wrong way though.

By trademark I mean game development company, basically, just like Wolfire.

Does someone have experience about trademark registration?
I mean, here there is a substantial amount of people who work in game design and development, so I thought someone may already have registered his/her/their own company.

In particular I would like to know how the registration is done, if the process costs a lot and if the path changes depending on the country you are in.

Thanks in advance




EDIT: By what I found after having posted this it seems the rules to register a trademark change depending on the country and so does the cost, which is relatively high anyway. Can someone confirm this please?

[Endoperez]

EDIT: By what I found after having posted this it seems the rules to register a trademark change depending on the country and so does the cost, which is relatively high anyway. Can someone confirm this please?

Erm, yes, different countries have different laws.

Creating a trademark is very different from creating a company. You can do something commercially for ages for no trouble at all without registering a trademark, as the ongoing Deadmau5 thing shows.

If you don't know how something is done, and it's something that costs real-world money, you want to get someone who knows these things to help you, not ask for help in an unrelated internet forum.

A quick duckduckgo search shows that trademark is something that's related to a product or service, not a company.

A company is a legal, I don't know the terminology but basically a legal person. A company can have a bank account, a company can own a car, a company can have an income and can have debts. Some companies are owned by a single person, some are owned by stockholders, some are co-operative, some company owners are liable to personally cover any debts the company has, other companies can go bankrupt with large dents with no financial harm happening to the owner(s).

It's all very much about law and legal things and contracts and registering things with a government. If you don't know about it, learn it. If you don't know about it and don't want to learn it, pay a lawyer to do things for you.

You probably don't need it that much.

[Korban3]

Also, being a legally legitimate company means someone can sue you for damages caused by your product unless you make them sign a waiver that is kept either archived on a backed up drive or kept on file in paper.
AFAIK

[Endoperez]

Also, being a legally legitimate company means someone can sue you for damages caused by your product unless you make them sign a waiver that is kept either archived on a backed up drive or kept on file in paper.
AFAIK

The waivers don't have any legal worth in some countries. E.g. Australia has strong customer protection.

An insurance that covers such things might be mandatory, again, depending on the country.

[Glabbit]

Wait, then what are the actual benefits of trademarking?

I'm sure there have to be some, at least.

[Sehiro]

If you don't know how something is done, and it's something that costs real-world money, you want to get someone who knows these things to help you, not ask for help in an unrelated internet forum.

Yeah, obviously before actually starting up I would have contacted a lawyer in my area, this thread was just to get some very general knowledge about the subject. As you could see I had perplexities even on how trademarks avoid copying each other (by chance or intentionally) if in different countries, so I even thought about an "overlooking entity" of sort which kept everything up to date, which is not. I am ignorant, not stupid, I would not blindly follow advice from the net.
What I am trying to say is that I am naive to an incredible extent (I opened with "I am ignorant" = without knowledge of things), so an answer from someone on the web, just like yours, is enough for me to start looking in the right places.

For example:

A quick duckduckgo search shows that trademark is something that's related to a product or service, not a company.

I found different infos, but probably because of different countries' laws. For "me" a company is represented by a trademark if provides a product. If it provides a service it is represented by a service mark. But anyway a trademark is basically a symbol for a company.
Anyway thank you for putting me on the right track: looking into what you said I came across copyright, of which I didn't think, which basically protect authorship of work. I'll dig into this more.

A company is a legal, I don't know the terminology but basically a legal person. A company can have a bank account, a company can own a car, a company can have an income and can have debts. Some companies are owned by a single person, some are owned by stockholders, some are co-operative, some company owners are liable to personally cover any debts the company has, other companies can go bankrupt with large dents with no financial harm happening to the owner(s).

Thank you for the clarification. Not just for this one, but for the whole answer, it definitely helped out.

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Also, being a legally legitimate company means someone can sue you for damages caused by your product unless you make them sign a waiver that is kept either archived on a backed up drive or kept on file in paper.
AFAIK

Thank you for the tip, will keep that in mind.

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Wait, then what are the actual benefits of trademarking?

I'm sure there have to be some, at least.

In Australia: http://magnumip.com.au/branding-tradema ... rademarks/
I am not from Australia.