Quoting Pistol Pete:

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When you say that companies are not required to carry a suffix at all, you are talking about business names in relation usually to either Sole Proprietorship or Partnership.

Corporations are not required to have a suffix. Most do, but not all.

Quoting Pistol Pete:

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Many states require a sole proprietor or partnership to operate under their personal names, unless they formally file a trade name, or a “Doing Business As” (DBA) name. As the DBA name is not the legal name of the individual or organization actually conducting the business, it is also called a “fictitious business name” in many states.

Right, and a company's DBA may be what we record as the studio or media company name. Warner Home Video may be a DBA of Warner Home Entertainment, Inc. for example and if that were true, we'd still use the DBA name of Warner Home Video.

Quoting Pistol Pete:

Quote:
If your business organization is not a Corporation or a Limited Liability Company, you can’t add a company suffix to your business name to create the impression that your business is a Corporation or a Limited Liability Company when, in fact, it is not. On the other hand, if your business organization is formed as a Corporation or a Limited Liability Company, it must include a corporate or a LLC designation at the end of the business name. In other words all Corporations and Limited Liability Companies are required to have a company suffix at the end of their business names whereas other forms of business organizations are not allowed to have it.

There's not a blanket requirement to have a suffix.

Quoting Pistol Pete:

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So, if you see ‘Corporation’ in a business name, the business organization in question is always a Corporation and ‘Corporation’ in the name is a company suffix.

It's true that they're corporations but it's not correct to state that it is a suffix in the sense that one could remove that word from the name and still have the name of the corporation.


Quoting Pistol Pete:

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The Vitaphone Corporation and Columbia Pictures Corporation in my previous example are both Corporations and the ‘Corporation’ part in these names is a company suffix. This should be clear as crystal and there should be no room for case by case basis, IMO.

Hopefully this will clarify the matter.

It's not clear as crystal and that's one of the issues we have with many of the rules we follow when they don't fit every possible situation. The credit for Vitaphone is nearly 70 years old. What rules of incorporation were in effect at that time? We can't deal with that level of detail to state a matter of fact answer that spans nearly a dozen decades of film history and dozens of localities.

The rule is simply stated and I don't think we can put the burden on the language of the rule to state that it means legal name rather than DBA name or to state that the corporate form is definitively not part of the name. On a simple basis, "The Vitaphone" makes no sense and the simple answer is to leave the "Corporation" word so that it does make sense.

Wow: up to page three while I already gave the one and only correct answer in the second post. 

And yes: kudos to James for explaining it all in much more detail.