When to Trademark a site?

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

This question occurred to me after noticing on Quora that there was a "problem" with the MOZ trademark (VS DOZ).

This is not exactly an SEO related question but since web promotion is by now far from only being SEO and moving more and more towards marketing I thought it is appropriate.

As far as I understand creating a Trademark to your domain / brand helps against copying the name of the brand and not the site's business or anything like that.

With that said, why / when should I spend approx. $1,000 to protect my/my client's brand...

Thanks

[dotfly]

Please keep in mind this is just my opinion/experience and no advice (you might need a lawyer for a reliable answer on that issue):

To register a site as a trademark seems to be a very tough thing to me. You have to imagine that a website consists of a lot of elements which are already under certain copyright laws.

If you use themes for the navigation, for buttons, pictures or even if your complete site is based on a theme which you might have adjusted these are all elements which you can`t claim as a trademark so easily.

You have to distinguish between the whole site and maybe just a brandname or logo. A brandname or logo can be registered as a trademark if it fits the requirements. If you can protect the brand of your client I would always recommend to do that because it gives him/her a lot of protection against competitors ...

Imagine this example: our company is called MusicStore... this is a generic expression which will never be registerable as a trademark. So now you can imagine what you have to keep in mind:

• be the one who gives the highest bids at Google AdWords

• always register company name related domains at first

and much more just to avoid that any competitor can use our company name to profit from...

If your client has any perspective to do business with his idea/brand for the next years, it is always worth to protect its brand... it means less hassle!