I'm only 16, but becuase of a creative mind, I have like a million different business ideas. But since i'm too young for most of them, can i design logos for them, copyright them and reserve them for my future business plans? Also, can you design and sell logos to major companies that are just starting up?

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Yes, you can copyright them but you would also want to register your trademarks and servicemarks with the State in which you plan to do business so no one else can use them.

This is AMERICA Son, GO FOR IT and don't let 1 person tell you any different. Your Age doesn't matter because if you have the money for the copy right and the money to take your ideas to the discovery AS SEEN ON TV people, then you will be able to reach the stars with your dreams coming true! "Never let them change your point of view" in the words of ROD STEWART. I have been married 20 yrs to the same man and have never been employed in these 20 yrs, I sell on ebay and make a great living at it. I live my dreams because this is my home business. I never did graduate high school but I still make a untaxable online living! @_@

You are thinking of a graphic design position designing logos and of course you can sell them. They go for a lot of money. Creating a brand can be very involved. Copyright is for works of art. I'm not entirely sure you could copyright unused logos. Usually, they are trademarked in a company's name.

You can't copyright logos and trademarks. You can register trademarks, but only if they are being used in interstate commerce. In order to qualify, some companies will produce a few cases of some phony-baloney product, slap a trademark on it, and "sell" one case a year to a friendly company in another state. Registering a trademark is relatively cheap - hundreds of dollars. You can get a design patent on your designs. This is relatively expensive - thousands of dollars. When you get older, you'll realize that lots of people have a million ideas, and if they spend just 5 years per idea getting them off the ground, they'll die about 5 million years too soon. What's more, as you get older, you'll get more and more ideas, and realize that there are fatal flaws in most of your old ideas. There's a well-established business tactic called the "trade secret" and that's really what you need to rely on. You don't invest thousands or even hundreds of dollars per idea - you simply buy a notebook. Inventors use a notebook with numbered pages, so that it's very clear that they haven't inserted something later, and they sign and date each page, and get someone trusted to sign and date each page as witness to their signatures. In your case, though, you don't need a witness. You just need to get these ideas down so that you don't forget them. When you are old enough to bring some of these ideas to fruition, you will want to sit down with that book every three months, and walk your fingers through the book, page by page, to see what ideas have ripened into something that needs to be exploited. As far as your second question goes, yes, you can design and sell logos to companies that are just starting up. If they are just starting up, they aren't yet major companies, though. There are a number of sites on the internet, for instance, that offer logo design for relatively few dollars. At 16, you could set up a site like that. If you sell one logo a week at $20 each, that'd be $1000/year, but more important, it would be lots of very valuable experience. I think you should go with *that* idea immediately!

Here is an article about trademarking a logo http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/steps-to-register-trademark-logo/