Protecting any words and images you create to promote your crowdfund investment business requires copyrights and/or trademarks. The familiar symbol © indicates that a copyright has been secured, and ® denotes a trademark. Copyrights protect books, songs, photographs, and other original works of authorship. And a trademark protects your logo.
Luckily, filing for these two types of protection isn’t quite as cumbersome as filing for patent protection and doesn’t necessarily require a lawyer. Websites such as LegalZoom allow you to file for copyright and trademark protection online.
Securing a trademark for your logo is as easy as creating an online profile on a site such as LegalZoom, completing a simple questionnaire, running a trademark search to make sure no one else is using the mark, and filing it with the USTPO. For copyright protection, you follow the same steps but need to provide samples of your work.
For under $200, you can have your trademark protected. And depending on how much written material you have and how sensitive it is, copyright protection starts at around $150.