You can enforce your non-registered brand in state or federal courts of the USA. You can optionally register your brand in one or more US states or in the federal USPTO for additional advantages. For example, the USPTO will automatically refuse applications for "confusingly similar brands" in your field, should anyone else apply.
You can register your trademarks in several forms including the initials, the brand spelled out, with or without combination of a distinctive logo design. You would be well advised to obtain professional advice from a trademark attorney regarding your proposed brand, obtaining a clearance search, and strategizing your various registrations, if any.
In particular, be careful about disclosing your plans to anyone prior to actually filing for a trademark, if you plan to file, since someone else could, in theory, file before you do and thus complicate things substantially.
On the other hand, even if someone else files, you have the priority date of your "first use in commerce", which would allow you to continue using your brand within the existing "markets" at the time someone else files a similar brand to use against you.
FWIW, copyright has nothing to do with "names".
copyright.gov Circular 34 "Copyright Protection Not Available for Names, Titles, or Short Phrases"
If you want actual protection for the trademark, hire an attorney who knows what they're doing. There are many steps that need to be taken not only to establish and register the trademark, but also to protect it.
If it doesn't mean that much to you, an anonymous message board on the internet is a good place to start.
Trademarks and copyrights are handled by http://USPTO.gov, you can find some information as well as searching for existing trademarks there.
Website copyright laws info site
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.ht...
If you can get the .com web site name, odds are it's not already trademarked. Three letter .com names are not available.
Be sure to do a web search for those 3 letters, odds are you will find more than one company in unrelated fields already using them. You might also find undesirable associations of these letters on Wikipedia or an urban slang site.
You would probably want to trademark both.
Remember trademarks are specific for "classes". If your class is not accurate that is the easiest way for others to fight your trademark.
Yes
I am trying to start a clothing company and have a few questions on how to trade mark the name.
I am going to use the clothing company LRG (Lifted Research Group) as an example.
My clothing idea is the same concept as LRG as in using three letters to represent my company and obviously the three letters stand for something.
My question is, should I trade mark the three letters or the actually meaning of the three letters? I was thinking it should be the actual meaning but I was wondering if I could get away with trademarking the three letters or maybe for example (LRG worldwide), the three letters and a word?
