Trademarking your name

It's typically a good idea to trademark your name as soon as you choose one. Names get picked up really fast and so do good webpages (like yourname.com or myspace.com/yourname).

So why should you trademark your band name?

Imagine that there are two bands with your name floating around. Let's pretend your band gets popular and you sell some CD's, and the other band plans to sue you for trademark infringement. Here's the problem: they own the trademark to your name. Now you have to pay this band with your same name all the royalties. Doesn't sound fun does it? Imagine if you were on the other side of the ball. That sounds like more fun doesn't it?

How about this scenario? You own the trademark to your band name, but there's already a website and a myspace page with your name with a band declaring their name as yours. Well, now you can fight for both pages!

You may not actually need a lawyer at all in the cases mentioned above. In almost all cases, as soon as you mention you own the trademark, they will work with you to dispute it before the law gets involved. A good example of this happening is the drummer of my current band. His previous band owned a trademark to a band name and there was another band with the same name. As soon as they talked about, my drummer's band ended up getting free gear in exchange for the name.

So where do you go now?

http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm

This only applies for bands in America though. If you're from another nation, check with your government's website and check for trademarks and patents.

You may also want to check out http://www.bandname.com/ to see if your band name is taken or not (legally).

Copyrighting your music

It's typically a good idea to copyright your music. Why? Well if someone decides to steal your music and make money off it, you can ask them to either pay all compensation or you will file a lawsuit. Of course, you don't want someone using your music without giving you credit either. So here's two methods:

1. Assuming you live in the US, you can file copyright either online or by CD for $35 with the US government at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/index.html
2. The free method is recording a CD and sending it to yourself with postal mail. It doesn't need to sound good. Burn it to a CD and head over to the post office and send it to yourself or one of your bandmates. Do not open it! If you do, consider the copyright void.

View the post on recording a cheap CD to learn how to record.