Protecting Your Name, Image & Likeness. Earning from your name is not the same as owning it.

There's a moment in every athlete's rise when the name stops being just a name. Maybe it's the first time a kid asks you to sign a jersey with your name on the back. Maybe it's the first brand email, the first camp flyer with your name across the top, the first time a crowd says it in unison. Whenever it happens, something legal happens along with it, quietly and without paperwork: your name starts functioning as what the law calls a source identifier. People see it and expect you, your standard, your story, your say-so.

Federal law has a category for exactly this. The Lanham Act, the statute governing every trademark in America, defines a service mark as any word, name, or symbol used to identify and distinguish one person's services from another's, 15 U.S.C. § 1127, and declares service marks registrable on the same terms as trademarks for goods. 15 U.S.C. § 1053. Endorsements, appearances, training camps, speaking, content, coaching: these are services, and the name they're sold under is a mark.

Here's the part I need you to sit with: that's already true of your name today. Functioning as a mark is automatic. Owning it as a mark is not. And in the gap between those two, functioning and owned, is where almost every story in this guide goes wrong: the fake merch, the lookalike camps, the contract that walked away with more than anyone said out loud.

I've registered names for people whose stories you know. SWIN CASH® is a federal registration for endorsement and speaking services, held by a WNBA champion and Olympian who understood that the name she built across a career deserved the same protection as any corporation's brand. That's the standard this guide holds you to, because your name has earned it.

If you've heard any legal term in the NIL conversation, it's probably "right of publicity." It's real, it matters, and it's only half the picture. Let me give you both halves, because the athletes who get hurt are usually the ones who thought one was enough.

The right of publicity: protection for the person. This is the legal principle that your identity, your name, image, likeness, sometimes your voice and persona, can't be used for someone else's commercial gain without your consent. It was born in a sports case: in Haelan Laboratories, Inc. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 202 F.2d 866 (2d Cir. 1953), a fight between chewing gum companies over baseball players' photos on trading cards, the Second Circuit first recognized that a person holds a property-like right in the publicity value of their own image. The Supreme Court has weighed in exactly once, siding with the performer: in Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co., 433 U.S. 562 (1977), a human cannonball sued a station that broadcast his entire act, and the Court held the First Amendment didn't shield the station from his right of publicity claim.

Here's the catch that surprises everyone: there is no federal right of publicity. It's state law, a patchwork. California's statute, Civil Code § 3344, is famously robust. Florida has its own, Fla. Stat. § 540.08. Other states protect more, less, or differently. Your protection under this body of law literally depends on where the misuse happens, and you can't register anything in advance; you can only sue after the fact, under whichever state's rules apply.

Trademark law: protection for the brand. Federal, uniform, nationwide, and, critically, something you can secure in advance. A registration on the Principal Register is statutory prima facie evidence that the mark is valid, that you own it, and that your right to use it for the registered services is exclusive. 15 U.S.C. § 1057(b). It's what makes platform takedowns fast, demand letters land, and licensing deals clean.

Think of it this way. The right of publicity is a shield you were born holding: it protects your personhood, reactively, under rules that change at every state line. A trademark registration is a title deed you have to go get: it protects your name as a business, proactively, under one federal system. The shield says "you can't use me without permission." The deed says "this name, for these services, is mine, everywhere in the country, and here's the government document that proves it."

You want both. You were born with one. The rest of this guide is about the other.

June 21, 2021, is a date worth knowing. That's when a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021), that the NCAA's limits on education-related benefits violated antitrust law. The decision followed years of groundwork, including O'Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049 (9th Cir. 2015), where the Ninth Circuit held that NCAA amateurism rules were not exempt from antitrust scrutiny, in a case built on the use of players' likenesses in video games. Days after Alston, with state NIL laws taking effect, the NCAA adopted its interim policy, and on July 1, 2021, college athletes could finally do what every other talented American had always been allowed to do: earn money from their own name.

I celebrate that, without an asterisk. Generations of athletes built fortunes for institutions while being forbidden to accept a free meal from their own fame. The door that opened in 2021 was long overdue.

Now let me tell you what did not walk through that door with you, because this is the conversation the NIL industry mostly skips.

NIL rights are permission, not property. The policy change means your school and the NCAA can no longer punish you for monetizing your name. It did not register your name to you. It did not stop anyone else from filing for it. It did not create any new federal right you can hold up when a knockoff camp or a fake merch shop appears. Every NIL deal you sign is built on top of your name; none of them puts the name itself in your hands.

The spotlight came with a target. NIL made athlete names commercially valuable earlier and more publicly than ever, which means the copycats, the squatters, and the opportunists arrive earlier too. A name trending out of a tournament run is a name someone else can attempt to file for, put on shirts, or attach to a "training academy" by the weekend. Your prior use matters in those fights, but as the monitoring and enforcement guide explains in depth, unregistered rights are the expensive, prove-everything kind.

The deals assume what they don't deliver. Read an NIL agreement closely and you'll notice it licenses rights in your name to the brand, the collective, or the platform. Licensing out rights you haven't secured is building the second floor before the foundation. It works fine until it's tested, and names that are winning get tested.

The NIL era handed you the pen. The trademark system is where you sign the deed. Treat them as two separate errands, because legally, that's exactly what they are.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of people absorbed the idea that you can't trademark a person's name. You can. Athletes, entertainers, and founders do it every week, and the register is full of names you'd recognize. What's true is that personal names come with three special rules, and knowing them is the difference between a smooth filing and a preventable refusal.

Rule one: the consent requirement. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1052(c), a mark that consists of or comprises the name of a particular living individual can't be registered without that individual's written consent. When the name is yours, this is a formality, one signed statement in your own application. The rule exists to protect you from everyone else: nobody can register your name without your signature on file. It also cuts the other way, and this matters for the athlete whose brand includes a family name, a duo, or a trainer's name alongside their own: every living person identified in the mark has to consent, in writing, before filing.

Rule two: the surname problem. The USPTO refuses marks that are "primarily merely a surname." 15 U.S.C. § 1052(e)(4). A bare last name, standing alone, is a weak candidate until it acquires distinctiveness through years of use. The practical fixes are the ones athletes naturally reach for anyway: the full name, the nickname, the name combined with another word (a number, a word like "brand" or "performance," an initialism). This is one of the reasons nicknames are quietly the strongest assets in sports branding: a distinctive nickname skips the surname problem entirely and often skips the crowded-field problem too.

Rule three: the name has to be doing a job. Trademark registration isn't a vanity record; it attaches to a name used in commerce with actual goods or services, or filed with a genuine intent to use it that way. Being famous is not a use. Selling the shirt, running the camp, doing the endorsements, licensing the content, those are uses. The good news is that an intent-to-use filing lets you lock in your priority date now and prove the use later, which, as the next chapters show, is exactly the tool a rising athlete needs.

And don't stop at the government name. The protectable portfolio of an athlete usually includes the nickname the fans actually use, the logo or monogram on the gear, the celebration or catchphrase that ends up on shirts, and the camp or foundation name. Each is its own asset, each is registrable on its own, and the full strength spectrum that governs which names are strong lives in The Lady Lawyer's Guide® to Trademark Registration.

Let me demystify what an athlete's trademark filing actually looks like, because the classes you choose are the walls of the house, and the pattern for athletes is distinct from any other kind of client.

Class 35 is the NIL class. The international classification system puts "promoting the goods and services of others," which is precisely what an endorsement is, in Class 35. When a brand pays you to post, appear, or vouch, you are rendering endorsement services, and Class 35 is where that business gets protected. This is the class at the heart of SWIN CASH®, registered for endorsement services along with educational and motivational speaking, and it's the class I look at first with every athlete client, because it covers the exact revenue stream NIL opened.

Class 41 is the performance-and-presence class. Entertainment services, personal appearances, motivational speaking, sports camps and clinics, training services, podcasts and ongoing video content. If people pay to watch you, hear you, learn from you, or put their kids in your camp, it lives here.

Class 25 is the merch class. Apparel and headwear. The jerseys, the hoodies, the nickname tees. If merchandise is real revenue or genuinely imminent, this class earns its fee; if it's an idea for someday, it can wait for a later filing.

Class 9 covers the downloadable world. Training programs sold as downloads, digital content, and media. Relevant for some athletes immediately, for others never.

Two judgment calls thread through every athlete portfolio. The first is sequencing: you almost never file everything at once. You file where the money is, add classes as the business grows, and keep the whole map in view so nothing is forgotten, which is the ongoing-portfolio discipline covered in the owner's manual guide. The second is the word-mark-first principle: register the name itself before the logo, because the word mark protects the name in every font, color, and design, while a logo filing protects one rendering of it. The logo follows when the budget does.

Every class is a separate government fee of $350, which is exactly why class strategy is attorney work and not a checkbox exercise. Claiming too little leaves doors open behind you. Claiming too much creates maintenance problems and wasted fees. Claiming right is the strategy call.

If I could put one sentence on a billboard outside every training facility in America, it would be this: the best time to protect your name is while it's still cheap to say.

Here's the machinery behind that sentence. The American trademark system runs substantially on filing dates. When your application eventually registers, your rights reach back to the day you filed, which means the filing date, not the registration date, is your place in line. And the intent-to-use application, covered fully in the registration guide, lets you claim that place based on a genuine intent to use the name commercially, before the merch exists, before the first deal signs.

Now put that machinery next to the shape of an athletic career. Value arrives in spikes: the tournament run, the viral moment, the draft, the transfer, the championship. Attention lands in a week. And in that week, three things happen at once: your name becomes dramatically more valuable, dramatically more visible, and dramatically more interesting to people who are not you. The squatter who files for a trending athlete's nickname, the print shop that has shirts up by Sunday night, the "academy" that borrows a hot name for its camps: none of them needed your permission to start, and every one of them is cheaper to beat if your filing predates your fame.

I want to be honest about what filing early does and doesn't do, because you deserve precision, not sales talk. It does not make you unbeatable; prior users with real rights still matter, which is why the search comes first. What it does is flip every future fight in your favor: you become the senior filer with the presumption instead of the latecomer with the burden of proof. In a dispute, that flip is frequently the whole game.

There's a quieter reason to file early, too, and it's the one I find athletes respond to most: doing it before the noise means you decide. You choose what's protected, who owns it, and how the deals will license it, in a calm season, with advice, instead of reacting mid-spike while three parties wave contracts. Ownership decided in peace beats ownership negotiated in chaos, every single time.

The first step costs $679 and three business days: a comprehensive search on your name, nickname, or brand, then a call with me about exactly where you stand. If the name is clear, we file while it's still quiet.

Search My Name — $679 →

This is the chapter I'd ask you to read twice, because in my files, more athlete name trouble starts with a signature than with a thief.

Every deal in the NIL economy touches your name rights somewhere in its paragraphs. Most of the touching is normal and fine: a brand needs a license to put your name in its campaign; that's the whole point of the deal. The trouble lives in the scope. Here's how to read for it.

The license that's really a transfer. A healthy NIL or endorsement deal grants a license that is limited in time, limited in purpose, and non-exclusive, your name, for this campaign, through this date. The unhealthy versions use the same word, "license," attached to words like perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and exclusive, sometimes with a right to sublicense. Read those four words together and understand what they build: a grant that behaves like ownership while being called a license. If a contract wants your name forever, exclusively, everywhere, with the right to hand it to others, that's not a marketing deal; that's an acquisition, and it should be priced and negotiated like one.

The collective and agency agreements. Collectives, marketing agencies, and management deals frequently include rights to use, and sometimes to register, marks connected to you. Occasionally an agreement quietly provides that brand assets created during the relationship belong to the agency. Picture what that means five years later: the logo on your gear, the camp name, maybe the nickname itself, owned by a company you've since left. Whether any of that is acceptable is your call to make, but it has to be a call, made knowingly, not a discovery.

The law gives you two guardrails worth knowing. First, under 15 U.S.C. § 1060, a trademark can only be assigned together with the goodwill of the business it symbolizes; a bare grab of the name without the goodwill risks invalidity, which is a useful thing to know when a contract's assignment clause gets greedy. Second, any license of your mark requires genuine quality control by you, because uncontrolled "naked" licensing can be treated as abandonment of the mark altogether, a doctrine covered in depth in the monitoring and enforcement guide. Quality control isn't bureaucracy; it's the legal leash that keeps your name meaning you while other people pay to borrow it.

And the leverage point underneath all of it: the athlete who walks into these negotiations holding a registration negotiates as an owner licensing property. The athlete without one negotiates over who gets to go file. Everything in Chapter 6 about filing early is also, quietly, deal preparation.

Before any agreement that touches your name gets your signature, the IP clauses are a thirty-minute read with me: what you're granting, for how long, what you're keeping, and what needs to be filed first. That's a consultation, flat $200, against clauses that are expensive precisely because they looked like boilerplate.

Review My Deal First — $200 →

Sooner or later, a known name attracts company it didn't invite: the merch shop selling your nickname, the camp flyer with your name on it, the ad that implies you endorsed something you've never touched, the social account signing deals as you. Here's the legal architecture waiting for that day, strongest first.

False endorsement, the athlete's Lanham Act claim. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a), using someone's identity in a way that falsely implies they endorse a product is actionable in federal court, registration or no registration. The athlete-shaped example is Abdul-Jabbar v. General Motors Corp., 85 F.3d 407 (9th Cir. 1996): GM ran an ad invoking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's college records under his former name, Lew Alcindor, without consent, and the Ninth Circuit held he could pursue a Lanham Act false endorsement claim alongside his California right of publicity claim. Two lessons ride in that case. First, federal law protects against implied endorsement even without a registration. Second, notice that the court analyzed both bodies of law from Chapter 2 side by side; that's the both-shields posture a protected athlete wants.

The state-law layer. Wherever the misuse happens, the local right of publicity statute or common law, Cal. Civ. Code § 3344 and Fla. Stat. § 540.08 being two prominent examples, adds a second claim aimed at the use of your identity itself. Patchwork, yes, but real teeth in the states that matter commercially.

And the registration-powered fast lanes. Everything above involves lawyers and time. What a federal registration adds is speed and presumption: platform and marketplace takedowns that resolve in days because the § 1057(b) presumption does the arguing, infringement claims under § 1114, recovery of the infringer's profits and up to treble damages under § 1117(a), statutory damages against counterfeit merch under § 1117(c), and up to $100,000 per domain against the fake-site registrants under §§ 1125(d) and 1117(d). The full escalation ladder, takedown to letter to proceeding, lives in the monitoring and enforcement guide, and every rung works better with a certificate behind it.

One practical note tailored to athletes: your infringement usually spikes when you do. The viral weekend that triples your following is the same weekend the knockoff shirts go up. That's why my monitoring runs as a subscription rather than a scramble, USPTO Watch at $49/month (daily register watch, including alerts when examiners cite your mark against someone else's filing) and Nationwide Watch at $99/month (adding a monthly nationwide sweep across marketplaces, business filings, domains, and social, misspellings and translations included), with a written report every month and a flat $500 member rate on investigated cease and desist letters ($1,200 standalone) when something needs teeth.

Start Watching My Name — from $49/month →

You've sat across from enough people sliding paper at you to deserve the whole number up front, so here it is, the same way I price everything: flat, staged, and with a real decision point between every step.

Step 1: Comprehensive Search & Attorney Review, $679. A federal, state, and common-law search on your name, nickname, or brand, a written report in 3 business days, and 30 minutes on the phone with me going through exactly what it means for you: what's clear, what's crowded, and what I'd file first. This is the only step you're committing to today, and if the search finds a problem, it just earned its fee, because bad news is still free to act on at this stage.

Step 2: Application Strategy, Drafting & Submission, $1,800 flat. Only if the search says go. The ownership decision (you, or an entity, a question with real tax and liability angles for athletes), the class strategy from Chapter 5, the consent statement from Chapter 4, the specimens, the drafting, the filing, and tracking through registration.

Step 3: USPTO filing fee, $350 per class. Paid to the government at submission, not to me.

One class, start to filed: $2,829, across three separate yes-or-no moments. Registration itself takes a year or more, and your priority runs from the day we file, which is the whole argument of Chapter 6 compressed into a sentence: the sooner the filing, the earlier the date, and the date is the asset.

Now the comparison that puts the number in its true light. A single mid-tier NIL deal can exceed it. A single investigated dispute with an infringer who filed first will exceed it severely. And a forced rebrand, walking away from the name your whole audience knows because someone else owns it on paper, costs more than money; it costs the compounding recognition you spent years building. Your name is the one sponsor that never drops you. Protect it like it protects you.

Start With the Search — $679 →