My college is thinking of starting a new magazine and we decided on a name that is already in use. We had various forms of the name, one was original but design-wise we liked spelling it all out, and hence, name ourselves off of what is already out there.

My question is, how do I go about ensuring that I can still use this name. We exist only for my school and our distribution is only about 1,000 a month. We do plan on getting advertising. But, I'm willing to change the name of the website so that there won't be any confusion there.

Will I still be in trouble if I use this name? How can I find out if this other publication has a trademark or not? Or, what? Or should we just scrap the idea of using the whole word, or the magazine name for that matter.

New to the business,

Editor08