I Am Pending, with a Capital "T" and a Captial "M"

That’s right. Any minute now, and when I say any minute now, I mean 13 - 18 months, Nanny Goats in Panties™ will officially have a registered Trademark! And until it’s official, I am “pending”. Do you know what that means? It means I can now put a little TM after “Nanny Goats in Panties™“. And after that, if approved, I get to put a little Circle R (®) after it.

It all started when a Facebook friend of mine said that she heard someone on a TV show (Men of a Certain Age, to be precise) say “goats in panties” and I thought, Oh my God, that’s MY phrase. I have to get my blog trademarked. Or copyrighted. Or something.

So, off I clicked to LegalZoom.com and started filling out the forms. And over four hundred dollars later, which in my humble opinion, is an expensive response to a TV quote (and hearsay, at that), despite the fact that LegalZoom said I saved over a thousand dollars going through them instead of a real lawyer — well, they might not have worded it exactly that way, the “real” part, I mean — Nanny Goats in Panties™ was in the trademark pipeline.

However, this trademark does not protect me from anybody selling T-Shirts that say Nanny Goats in Panties™. THAT would cost an additional filing fee of $295. And if I wanted to sell coffee mugs with trademark protection? That would cost another $295.00. Because coffee mugs fall under a different class than T-Shirts (which fall under a different class than a blog).

So what DID I get for my original $295 plus a one hundred and something fee from LegalZoom.com? I have absolutely no idea.

Wait - that’s not true, the LegalZoom.com guy told me over the phone that he thought my blog was funny. So there’s that.

Oh, and it probably counts as a business expense. Wow, the benefits are already piling up!