Almost everything people believe about this follows from one sentence nobody says at the counter. A register of this kind records your claim. It does not test it. Nobody goes away and confirms that you made the thing, that what you have described is one work rather than five, or that every person who had a hand in it agreed to your putting your name on it. The entry on the register is worth precisely as much as the claim behind it — and the claim is written by you. That one fact reorganises the whole exercise, because it means the work is all before the filing, and it means a bad entry is not a neutral event. A careless claim is dated, public, and in your own words. It can be read back to you for as long as it exists, which is a long time. The useful comparison is a register that does examine. When you apply for a mark, somebody reads the application against a register and a set of tests and comes back with questions, which feels like an obstacle and is in fact a service: it catches your problems for you. Here there is far less of that, so nothing catches your problems except you, and the discipline an examiner would have imposed is a discipline you have to impose on yourself. Three pieces of work follow, all of them before anything is filed. First, the boundary. What exactly is the work? Most people have never drawn that line, and many arrive wanting to register something that is not a single work at all — a brand is not a work, an idea is not a work, and an application or a website is almost never one work but a bundle of several with different authors and different histories. Second, the deposit. What you lodge is the body of the claim, which produces the most under-appreciated fact in the subject: a registration is a dated photograph of one version, not an umbrella over everything you will ever make. Your work keeps changing; the register keeps the copy you gave it. For anything living — software, a site, a course, a catalogue — that means a policy rather than a single act, and it means you choose the version deliberately instead of lodging whatever was to hand. And whatever is lodged cannot be un-lodged, so it is read before it goes, not after. Third, the people. Everybody who had a hand in it, including the freelancer from four years ago, the employee who left, the friend who drew one thing, and the material that came from somewhere else. Consents are not bureaucracy. They are what makes the claim true — and the person who has moved on has every reason to sign today and none at all in three years. What we rule out before taking a rupee: no opinion from us on whether something is protected or how far, no claim filed in the name of an owner we have reason to doubt, and no filing in the wrong register merely because that is the service you walked in asking for.
What this guide covers
A register is a list of entries. Each entry says: on this date, this person stated that they hold this thing. That is the shape of it, and the shape is worth holding in mind because it is smaller than what most people imagine they are buying.
An entry is a record of a statement. It is not a finding, not a certificate of quality, and not somebody else’s opinion about your work. It is your sentence, written down somewhere durable, with a date attached.
That is genuinely useful. It is also precisely as useful as the sentence.
Here is the sentence the whole page is built on, and nobody says it at the counter.
A register of this kind writes down what you tell it. It does not test it.
Nobody goes away and confirms that you made the thing. Nobody checks whether what you have described is one work or five tangled together. Nobody telephones the person who drew the first version to ask whether they agree that it is yours. Nobody opens the folder you lodged to see what else is inside it.
This is not a criticism of how the system works; a register that verified every claim would be a court, and it would take years. It is simply a fact about what you are getting, and once you have absorbed it, every sensible decision in this subject becomes obvious.
Three consequences, each of which contradicts something people assume.
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The clearest way to feel the difference is to put it beside a register that behaves the other way.
When you apply for a name or a mark, somebody actually reads the application. They compare it against what is already on the register and against a set of tests, and they come back to you with questions. That coming-back is an objection, and applicants experience it as an obstacle, a delay and an expense.
| An examined register | A register that records | |
|---|---|---|
| Your claim is | Read and tested | Written down |
| Problems surface | During the process | Years later, if at all |
| Who catches errors | Somebody else, first | Only you, before filing |
| Feels like | An obstacle | A formality |
| Actually is | A service you did not ask for | A responsibility nobody mentioned |
Read that last row again, because it is the practical lesson rather than a nicety.
An examination is a free, compulsory audit of your own paperwork, performed by somebody with no interest in sparing your feelings. It is irritating and it is also the reason a trademark applicant rarely ends up with a quietly defective registration: their defects got pointed out.
Here, nothing catches your problems except you. The discipline an examiner would have imposed is a discipline you have to impose on yourself, and most of what we do on these files is simply being that examiner before anything is lodged.
Every part of the entry originates with you. The description of the work. The statement of who made it. The assertion about who holds it now. The copy lodged. None of it is drafted by a neutral person and none of it is checked.
Clients sometimes find this liberating for about a minute, and then they see the other side of it. If the whole entry is yours, then every imprecision in it is yours too, permanently and with your name on it.
That is why we read what we are about to file as though we were an opponent, which is an unpleasant exercise and the one that earns the fee.
This surprises people, so here is the mechanism plainly.
Suppose a work was really made by three people and the entry names one. Or suppose the description is written loosely, so it reads as covering a whole family of material when really it covers one item. Or suppose the owner named is a person when the thing has always sat with a company.
In each case you have not produced a harmless piece of paper. You have produced a statement, in your own words, that is inaccurate, and you have put a date on it and placed it where anybody can find it. If the question ever arises, the entry is not merely useless — it is the first document anybody will quote.
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Those three words together are what makes an inaccurate entry costly, and it is worth separating them because each contributes something.
Take any one of the three away and a loose entry would be a small thing. Together they are the reason we would rather spend an extra fortnight on the claim than file quickly.
Now the first real piece of work, and the one almost nobody has done before arriving.
What exactly is the work? Not roughly. Not “our stuff”. A boundary, with things inside it and things outside it, that somebody else could apply without asking you questions.
Nearly every difficulty later in these files is traceable to a boundary that was never drawn, because an undrawn boundary produces a loose description, and a loose description is the imprecision that lives on the register with your name beside it.
We say this without any superiority, because the vocabulary around this subject is genuinely confusing and nobody is taught it.
People arrive wanting to register their brand, which is not a work. Or their idea, which is not a work either. Or their app, which is usually several works rather than one. Or sometimes their business, which is not the sort of thing this register holds at all.
Our first conversation is therefore usually a sorting exercise rather than a sales one, and it frequently ends with us telling somebody that part of what they want belongs elsewhere and part of it does not need doing at all. We would rather have that conversation than take a fee for filing in the wrong place.
A brand is a bundle of different things held together by how customers feel about them, and the law does not hold them together at all.
The name is a different register entirely — that is trademark work, with its own tests, its own timeline and its own examiner. The logo, the illustrations, the photography, the written content and a jingle may each be their own work, with their own author and their own history.
So the sentence “we want to register our brand” usually translates into one trademark exercise and somewhere between one and six separate claims here — and the useful first step is simply writing that list out, because until it exists nobody can say what the job is.
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We will put this gently because people are often attached to the idea, and it is frequently the most valuable thing they have.
A register of this kind holds things that have been made — fixed in some form that can be lodged and looked at. A concept that exists in conversation and in your head is not in that condition, however good it is and however much work went into having it.
Where the real need is to discuss something with a potential partner, investor or manufacturer before it exists in a fixed form, the instrument for that is a confidentiality agreement, which is a wholly different tool doing a wholly different job. The doctrine underneath all of this — what is protected and what is not — is set out at length in our guide on what happens when somebody copies you, and it is advice-heavy reading that we deliberately do not duplicate here.
Most modern things people want to register are bundles, and a bundle behaves differently from a single item in one critical respect: its pieces have different authors and different histories.
A single item has one story. A bundle has as many stories as it has pieces, and a claim made over the whole bundle is only as true as its weakest piece. The piece that causes trouble is rarely the one you were thinking about when you decided to register.
So the method is always the same: take the bundle apart on paper first, then decide what to claim.
Take an application as the clearest example. Inside it, typically:
Six categories, potentially six histories. Whether any of that is a problem is not our question — the agreement side of it is dealt with separately. Our question is narrower and more immediate: what are you claiming, and can the file behind it support that?
The same applies, and a website has an extra feature that makes it harder: it changes without anybody deciding that it has changed.
Text gets edited. Images get swapped. A section is added by somebody in marketing on a Tuesday. There is rarely a moment anybody would identify as a version, which means that when you come to deposit, the question “which one?” has no natural answer and somebody has to make it up.
Making it up deliberately, and recording that you did, is enormously better than making it up accidentally — which is the subject of the next part of this page.
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Practically, this is a table you fill in before anything else happens. One row per piece.
| Column | What goes in it | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| The piece | One identifiable thing | Forces the bundle apart |
| Who made it | A person, by name | Not a department, not “us” |
| When | Roughly is fine | Reveals the pre-company era |
| On what terms | Employed, paid, favour, bought, unknown | Tells us what consent is needed |
| From elsewhere? | Yes / no / not sure | “Not sure” is the useful answer |
| In or out | Inside the claim or excluded | The boundary itself |
It takes about an hour. In our experience it surprises the person who commissioned the work roughly nine times in ten, and what it surprises them with is a name they had forgotten.
Once the table exists, the next decision is whether what you have is one claim or several, and the honest answer is that it depends on how the pieces relate to each other rather than on what is cheaper.
Where pieces genuinely form a single made thing with one history, treating them as one is natural. Where they have different authors, different dates and different conditions attached, forcing them into one claim makes the whole claim carry the weakest piece.
We will tell you which we think applies and why. We will also tell you where the honest answer is “this piece should not be in any claim at all at the moment”, which is frequently the most useful sentence in the engagement.
A small thing that is not small. Whatever you call the work on the entry is what it will be called for as long as the entry exists, and people choose the title in about four seconds at the end of a long process.
A title that is too broad invites the question of whether the entry really covers all of that. A title that is too narrow makes it awkward to show that the entry is about the thing you now care about. A title that uses an internal nickname means nobody outside your office can connect the entry to the work at all.
Spend ten minutes on it. Prefer plain and descriptive over clever, and prefer a title that somebody who has never met you could match to the deposited copy without help.
Now the second piece of work, and the most under-appreciated fact in the whole subject.
What you lodge is the body of the claim. Years later, what exists is not your memory of what you registered. It is the copy you handed over.
Not the current version on your site. Not the thing you have in your head when you say “our software”. The copy. Whatever is in it, is in it; whatever is not, is not; and whatever state it was in on the day is the state it is permanently recorded in.
Everything in the rest of this section follows from that one sentence, and almost nobody is told it before they lodge.
Put the two halves together. Your work moves. The register holds a copy that does not.
So what you have obtained is a dated photograph of one version. That is a real and useful thing — a photograph with a date on it is exactly what you want when somebody needs to know who held what and when. But a photograph of a thing in June does not become a photograph of the same thing in December simply because it is the same thing.
This is the single most common misunderstanding we meet, and it is never anybody’s fault. Nobody says it out loud, so people reasonably assume that registering a work covers the work as it goes on developing. It does not work that way, and knowing that changes what you do.
It is worth stating the negative version too, because the positive one is easy to nod along to and still misremember.
An entry is not an umbrella held over you, your business, your output or your future. It does not stretch to cover the next version because the next version is recognisably the same product. It does not cover the three other things you made that year because they are by the same hand.
One claim, one bounded work, one deposited copy, one date. If you want four things covered, that is a decision about four things, and the right time to make it is now rather than when somebody asks.
Which brings the decision nobody makes consciously: which version are you freezing?
What usually happens is that somebody is asked for a copy, goes to a folder, and sends whatever is in it. That is a decision — it is simply a decision made by a folder rather than by a person. The version in that folder may be three revisions old, may be a working draft, may be the one with the placeholder image still in it.
Choose instead. Look at what exists, decide which state of the work is the one worth having a dated photograph of, assemble that state deliberately, and write down what you chose and why. Ten minutes of thought, and it is the difference between an entry that matches reality and one that drifted from it on day one.
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Then time does its thing. The work carries on. The registered version stays where it is. Between them a gap opens, and the gap has a particular quality that makes it dangerous: nobody experiences the moment it opens.
There is no day on which somebody says “we have now diverged from what we registered”. There is a Tuesday on which a section is rewritten, a month in which an interface is redesigned, a quarter in which half the code is replaced. Each step is small, nobody connects it to a filing made three years ago, and then one day somebody needs the entry and discovers it describes a thing that no longer exists.
Drift is not a failure of care. It is the default, and the only defence is a decision taken in advance.
So for anything living — software, a website, a course, a catalogue, a product range — the right output of this exercise is not just an entry. It is a short written policy, and we produce one as a matter of course.
People ask for a rule and there is not one, because “significant” depends entirely on what the thing is. What we can offer is the set of moments at which it is worth asking the question, which is more practical than a rule anyway.
The last two are the ones that catch people, because they are the moments at which somebody else finally reads your entry carefully.
A natural instinct, and one we understand: lodge as little as possible, because lodging feels like giving something away.
Weigh it honestly. What you lodge is what you claimed, so lodging less claims less. Lodging something partial produces an entry that describes a fragment, and the fragment is what exists. And lodging something that creates a misleading impression of the whole is worse than either, because it is back in the territory of a dated, public, self-authored statement that is not accurate.
Where confidentiality genuinely matters — and sometimes it genuinely does — say so at the start. We will tell you what the realistic options are and where the limits sit. What we will not do is quietly lodge something thin and let you leave believing it covers everything.
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Treat everything you lodge as permanent. Plan on that basis and you will never be unpleasantly surprised.
This is a hard rule in our practice rather than a caution, and it is the reason for a question clients sometimes find odd: what is inside this that you would not want sitting on a record for several decades?
Which produces a step that sounds too obvious to mention and is skipped on most files we inherit: somebody opens the deposit and looks at all of it.
Not a glance at the first page. Every file, every folder, every item. It is tedious, it takes a couple of hours on anything substantial, and it is the single step most likely to catch something you will be glad was caught.
We do it on every file and we do it as the last thing before lodging, not the first, because what gets added at the end of a project is exactly what nobody has reviewed.
Now the third piece of work, and the one clients find intrusive. We think it is better to explain why we insist than to apologise for asking.
There are two questions, and people collapse them into one. Who made it is a question of fact, with names and dates. Who holds it now is a question of law that depends on what was agreed, how, and when.
We do not answer the second — that is an advocate’s work on your facts, and anybody at our end who answers it confidently is doing you a disservice. But the second cannot even be approached until the first has been answered honestly, and the first is the one nobody has written down.
So we ask for a list. Everybody who had any hand in any part of the work, by name, with roughly when and roughly what.
The instruction that matters is this: include the people you think do not count. That is the instruction people ignore, and it is the one the whole exercise depends on, because the person who causes difficulty later is almost always somebody the client genuinely did not think of as a contributor.
We are not building a case against you. We are building a file that can support the claim you are about to make.
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The recurring characters, offered because recognising one is usually enough to jog the rest loose.
Paying somebody and holding what they made are not automatically the same thing, and the gap between them is where a great deal of trouble lives.
Whether something is yours turns on what was agreed and in what form, and that is a legal question which we send to an advocate rather than guessing at. What we can tell you is the documentary consequence, which arrives much sooner: a claim is weak when the file behind it cannot show the chain. Not wrong, necessarily. Weak — which is to say, unable to answer a question it will one day be asked.
So we ask for whatever the engagement was: a contract, an email, a quotation, a message thread. Where there is nothing at all — which is common and not shameful — the practical answer is usually a short consent or no-objection obtained now. It costs very little and it closes the gap permanently. Going forward, getting the engagement terms right at the start means never needing one again.
“They made it as part of their job” is the most frequently made assumption in this subject, and it is often correct. It is not always correct, and the exceptions cluster in places that are easy to overlook.
Once again, the legal answer is an advocate’s. The documentary answer is ours and it is the same in every case: whatever the position is, the file should contain something that shows it. Engagement terms where they exist; a short written confirmation where they do not, obtained while the relationship is intact.
A category of its own because it behaves differently from the others. Somebody did something for nothing, because they liked you, and precisely because no money changed hands nobody has ever thought of it as a transaction with consequences.
It is also the easiest one to resolve, if you resolve it now. A person who helped you as a favour is usually delighted to confirm in writing that they are happy for you to treat it as yours; it costs them nothing and it is a pleasant exchange. The same request made in five years, after a falling-out or simply after drifting apart, is a difficult conversation and sometimes an impossible one.
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This is the sentence we most want to leave with anybody who reads only part of this page.
Consents are not bureaucracy. They are what makes the claim true.
They are not a formality demanded by a process. The register does not require us to prove any of this — remember that it tests nothing. We ask because a claim that quietly leaves somebody out is not a claim we can make comfortably, and because an entry supported by a complete file is worth something while an entry supported by an incomplete one is worth whatever survives the first serious question.
You are not collecting signatures to satisfy a clerk. You are collecting the things that make the sentence on the register accurate.
There is a curve here that is worth seeing once, because it recurs in every part of documentation work.
The willingness of a contributor to confirm something in writing is at its highest while the relationship is current and the request is small. It declines steadily from there, and it does not decline for any dramatic reason — people move, lose touch, become busy, develop a vague sense that something is being asked of them for a reason they do not understand.
A consent is free today, awkward next year and sometimes unobtainable after that — while being worth precisely the same in all three cases. There is only one sensible moment to ask, and it is whichever one you are in now.
The hardest version is the person who has already gone: the co-founder who left, the developer who moved abroad, the designer whose agency has closed.
Two honest things about this. First, it is often still worth asking, and people are frequently more gracious than clients expect — the dread is usually larger than the conversation. Second, where it cannot be done, the right response is not to pretend. We will record what is known, keep whatever contemporaneous evidence exists of what they did and on what basis, and make the claim in terms that are accurate about the position rather than terms that paper over it.
Where that gap looks material, it is an advocate question and we will say so rather than filing and hoping.
Nearly every substantial work made in the last decade contains something that came from somewhere else, and that is completely ordinary. A font. A stock image. A clip. A sound. A component. A snippet.
The point is not that borrowed material is a problem in itself. The point is that the claim has to be about what is yours, and a deposit that silently includes material from elsewhere makes the claim say something nobody intended it to say.
The honest route is nearly always the same: identify it, and deal with it separately. Sometimes that means keeping it out of what is deposited. Sometimes it means producing whatever permission exists and noting it. Occasionally it means stopping and getting advice. What we will not do is file a claim that quietly sweeps it in.
A practical request, made without judgement: tell us at the start. We are going to open the deposit and look at everything in it, so we will find it anyway, and finding it at the end costs you a fortnight.
Nobody at our end is shocked by a purchased image or a borrowed component. What creates difficulty is discovering one at the point where everything else is ready, because then the choice is between delaying and filing something we have just learned is inaccurate — and we will always delay.
Putting it together, here is the list of questions, with the reason attached to each, since the reasons are what make them tolerable.
| What we ask | Why |
|---|---|
| Every person who touched it, including the forgotten | The forgotten one is the one that returns |
| What was agreed with each, in any form | The file has to show the chain |
| Anything inside that came from elsewhere | The claim must be about what is yours |
| Which version, and why that one | A decision rather than a folder |
| Where the work will live in ten years | Decides the name on the entry |
| What you would not want permanently on a record | Nothing can be un-lodged |
A deceptively small field that causes a disproportionate amount of later work.
The question is not whose work it feels like. It is: where is this thing going to live for the next ten years? Entries do not move on their own, and the moment at which the name becomes important is almost never the moment at which it is chosen — it is years later, when somebody outside your business reads the entry for the first time and asks why it says what it says.
Think forward rather than sideways. The answer is usually obvious once the question is asked in those terms, and it is almost never asked.
Obvious when stated, routinely ignored in practice, because in a small business the founder and the business are the same thing in everybody’s mind.
They are not the same legal person. A work standing in the name of an individual does not stand in the name of the company however closely the two are associated, however completely the individual owns the company, and however clearly everybody involved understands the position.
If a company is being formed in the next few months, say so now. The sequencing genuinely matters, and getting it in the right order costs nothing at the start and is real work afterwards.
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It can be done. It is a separate exercise with its own documentation, and the thing worth knowing is when people discover they need it.
Almost always at the worst possible moment: during a funding round, in the middle of a sale, while negotiating a licence, or when a larger counterpart’s advisers go through everything carefully for the first time. At that point it is urgent, it is visible, and it is being done under somebody else’s timetable.
Which is the argument for thinking about the name once, calmly, at the beginning, rather than inheriting a decision made by whoever happened to be filling in a form.
Entries last a long time. The contact details attached to them age at the ordinary speed of email addresses and office addresses, which is to say quickly.
Use something institutional rather than personal — an address and an email that belong to the business rather than to whoever did the work — and note somewhere that these details exist and may need updating. It is a small thing that prevents the slightly absurd situation of a correspondence arriving at an inbox nobody has opened since the person left.
The entry is one half. The other half is the file behind it, which nobody else holds and which you will not be able to reconstruct.
That set is the thing that makes the entry answerable years later. Keeping it under maintenance costs very little per year and pays for itself the first time somebody asks, which will be on a date you cannot see coming.
Our stated turnaround is 15 – 90 days, which is a wide range and we would rather explain it than quote a comfortable number.
Part of the elapsed time is not within anybody’s control at our end, and we do not make promises about that portion. The part that is ours is the preparation, and the preparation is where the variation actually comes from. A work that is already bounded, already assembled, made entirely by people still with you, with the engagement terms in a folder, is quick. Very few arrive in that condition.
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We will tell you at the outset which of those apply to you and roughly what each adds, so that the range stops being a mystery and becomes a plan.
Remember what the entry is: a statement by you. A dispute is somebody saying that statement is wrong — about who made the work, about what it covers, about who holds it.
That is the point at which this stops being documentation and becomes advice, and we hand it over rather than carrying on with it. We will help assemble and explain the file, because that is ours and because a clean file is exactly what your advocate needs. What happens next, and what should be said to anybody, is not ours.
One piece of practical guidance that is documentation rather than advice, and it is the one we most wish people followed.
Do not reply to anybody in writing before taking advice. An early, well-intentioned, reasonable-sounding reply has a habit of becoming the document everybody argues about afterwards — because it was written quickly, by somebody upset, without knowing which sentences would turn out to matter.
Nothing is lost by waiting a few days. A great deal can be lost by a paragraph sent on the evening the letter arrived. An hour of advice at that stage is worth many times what it costs, and it is also the moment at which the separate guide to the enforcement side becomes the right reading.
People sometimes pause things while an application is pending, which is usually unnecessary and occasionally costly.
What is worth doing meanwhile is the dull discipline that supports everything on this page: keep dated records of what you make and when; keep the deposited copy sealed and separate from the version you are still editing; and keep both somewhere that will still exist after the next laptop. None of that depends on anything being pending. All of it is more valuable than waiting.
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An honest account, because this subject attracts overstatement from people who sell it.
That last one is undersold, and in our experience it is the benefit clients mention a year later.
Enough to stop somebody filing in the wrong place, and no more, because each of these is its own subject.
| If what matters is… | Then the exercise is… |
|---|---|
| A name, word or mark you trade under | A trademark application — examined, different tests |
| How an article looks | A design registration — its own register |
| How something works, technically | An invention filing — a long and specialised road |
| Something not yet made, to be discussed | A confidentiality agreement — a contract, not a register |
| Letting somebody else use your work | A licence — also a contract |
| Rights across a film or a catalogue | Its own structure entirely |
Where more than one applies to the same thing — which is common — we will say so plainly rather than selling you whichever one we happened to be discussing when you called.
Look down that list once more. Nothing on it is difficult, nothing on it is legal, and nothing on it was expensive at the time it could still have been avoided. What they share is that each becomes visible only when somebody outside your business finally reads the entry carefully — which is exactly the day you need it to be sound.
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Our part for registering a work — building the boundary table with you, sorting what belongs here from what belongs elsewhere, compiling the contributor list and drafting the consents, deciding and assembling the version to be fixed, reading the whole deposit before it is lodged, drafting the entry as a precise statement in the right name, and writing the version policy and the file note — is ₹4,999, with a turnaround of 15 – 90 days.
Part of that elapsed time is not ours and we make no promises about it. The part that is ours is the preparation, and whether it runs short or long depends on the five things set out above rather than on anything mysterious. You will know which of them apply to you in the first conversation, not in the fourth week.
These sit outside, each for a reason rather than as an upsell:
And the framing. The entry is a sentence you will be stuck with; what you are paying for is that the sentence is true, bounded and supported. Not that your work is protected, which is not ours to say. Not that anything will be prevented, which an entry does not do. Only that the statement on the record is one you would be content to have read aloud, slowly, in ten years, by somebody looking for a weakness in it.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
The neighbouring register, and the opposite discipline. Here you put a claim on a record about something you have made and fixed. Where what matters is how something works, the exercise is a patent — and its defining feature is that talking about the thing beforehand cannot be undone. Our guide to that groundwork covers the disclosure log and why showing is heavier than telling.
One product routinely needs more than one of these. Leaflets, artwork and photography sit here; the shape of the article itself sits in the design register, which protects only the features function did not compel. Businesses that filed one of the two usually believe the product is covered.
One more thing a maker gets asked for, and it belongs in none of these registers. A product number is a shared vocabulary rather than a right — it protects nothing, and the real work in it is a spreadsheet of sellable units rather than an application.
We build the boundary table with you before anything is filed, sort what belongs on this register from what belongs on another, compile the contributor list including the people you had forgotten, draft and chase the consents while relations are still good, choose and assemble the version being fixed rather than lodging whatever is in a folder, read the entire deposit before it goes, and draft the entry in the name that will still be right in a decade. We do not tell you whether something is protected, and we do not file a claim we have reason to doubt.
Why this page is written the way it is, and what it refuses to contain
You will find no statutory references here, no form names, no office procedure and no figures apart from what we charge. Some of those gaps need explaining rather than defending.
The doctrine is somebody else’s subject, and we have not borrowed it. What attracts protection, where the line between an idea and its expression falls, how much copying is too much, what defences exist and what remedies follow — all of that is set out at length in our separate guide to the enforcement side, and all of it is advice-heavy. Reproducing it here in compressed form would make this page longer and more dangerous, because a compressed account of a doctrine is exactly the thing a reader acts on without realising how much has been left out.
What is left when the doctrine is removed is a documentary exercise with no natural owner. That is this page. Its organising fact is structural rather than legal: a register that records rather than examines places the entire burden of accuracy on the person making the claim. Everything above is a consequence of that one feature — the boundary that must be drawn because nobody else will draw it, the deposit that becomes the body of the claim because nothing else fixes its content, the consents that make the claim true because nothing verifies it, and the care over the name because nothing corrects it.
Why the comparison with an examined register appears so early. Because it is the fastest way to make the point land for somebody who has been through a trademark application and found it frustrating. The examination they resented was doing something for them that nothing does here. Once a reader sees that, the rest of this page stops sounding like excessive caution and starts sounding like the obvious response to a known gap.
What is deliberately absent. No statement about what is or is not protectable. Nothing at all about infringement, defences, remedies or duration. No form numbers, fee amounts, office names or procedural steps, because those change and a reader would rely on them. No promise about any period, outcome or effect. No assessment of anybody’s work. Three places to go instead, depending on the question. Protection, ownership in law and anything to do with copying: an advocate, on your own facts. What was agreed with a particular contributor: the engagement paper itself, whatever form it takes. And what you actually registered: the deposited copy — the one document everybody is certain they remember and almost nobody has reopened.
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