# Trademark assignment

The paper that moves a brand from the seller's name to the buyer's.

An asset sale transfers what the agreement lists, so a mark nobody listed stays with the seller, who is then free to use it. That is the whole exposure and it is easy to miss on a business whose value is mostly a name people have trusted for twenty years. A registered mark moves by a signed written instrument, recorded with the trademark office within three months to hold off a later purchaser, and federal law lets a mark be assigned only with the [goodwill](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/goodwill) of the business it identifies. That is why the mark and the customer list travel together or neither is worth much. Rights in an unregistered name follow use, so a seller who keeps operating anything under it keeps a claim. Three more things live beside the mark and appear in no schedule by default: the domain, the social accounts, and the phone number the customers dial.

In numbers: A $4.2M price built on a twenty-year-old name, with an agreement listing the vans and omitting the mark, transfers the vans.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/trademark-assignment
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt