In Whose Name Should I Apply For My Trademark?

Typically, big corporations don't ask this question because they have already figured it out. They already know through their corporate lawyers which of their entities should hold onto their intellectual property.

Also if you are one-man show without a company, you also won't be asking this question because it's obvious: the only way you can trademark your brand is to file it in your own name.

If you are a partnership, if there are a few people who are running a business together without setting up a separate company, which, by the way, is something that I strongly recommend against, because partnerships can be very, very dangerous, because it's not really an entity, it's an agreement. And if something goes wrong, each of the partners can be liable for everything that somebody else, one of the other partners, did. If they took a loan and disappeared on the Bahamas, then the other partners would be personally liable with their personal assets for that loan. So, if you figured out that your business has a chance of becoming successful, if you have other people on board, set up a company. It's very simple, it doesn't cost a lot of money, it's fast and it's certainly a lot simpler to untangle if things go wrong. Plus you can’t file a trademark on behalf of a partnership, again, because it’s not an entity.

The other situation is when one owner owns a company, so it’s a corporation with a single owner and there the question is, Do I file it in my personal name or in the name of the company? Most of the time, it doesn't matter unless you are planning to have investors or having other shareholders who would be interested in getting the brand. So if you are not seeking for investors and if you're planning to keep 100% ownership of the company, it really doesn't matter unless there is a risk of your company going bankrupt. If your company goes bankrupt and the company owns the brand, then the brand is going to die. So, the only way for you to save the brand would be to assign the trademark back to you before the bankruptcy starts.

But you can always move the ownership of your trademark, even if it is just the application stage, so you can assign the trademark registration or the trademark application from you personally to your company or from your company to you personally.

And the last type of situation is when there are several owners of the company and, at that point, the answer is usually very obvious. You would file it in the name of the company because it would be very difficult for one of the co-owners to explain to all the other co-owners why the trademark is owned by just one of them, not all of them.

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