A trademark is the distinctive identification that defines your company, product, or service from the competition. Your company’s intellectual property is a registered trademark. It safeguards the time and effort you put into earning your customers’ confidence and loyalty. A company’s TM registration is crucial and necessary because it highlights your unique identity and helps in the development of customer trust and loyalty. It also provides legal protection for your brand’s identity and protects it from unlawful use.
Intellectual property is a critical component of economic growth. A country’s ability to secure ownership of its businesses’ products and processes ensures not only higher local income, but also enhanced international recognition and sales. This emphasises the importance of trademark ownership over product promotion and identification.
What’s more crucial is understanding the basics in order to prevent costly legal disputes over intellectual property protection. In this post, we’ll go over some of the key characteristics of trademarks that businesses should be aware of and use in their trademark development and filing processes.
Reasons for Denials of Trademark Registration
What are the reasons for TM registration online denials? Your mark is
- Similar to existing marks
- Similar in terms of usage or marketing strategy
- An identical definition of a service, product, or geographic location that is easily confused with other brands by the general public
- Deceptive, puzzle, or misleading
- A name given to a person or a family.
The process of brand registration online is more difficult than it appears. It involves a lot of procedures as well as government follow-up. Vakilsearch has taken care of the majority of the work for you. To protect your company’s logo, slogan, and brand, register a trademark today.
Trademark Pitfalls
Your brand identity is your trademark. Anything from sounds to smells to colours to holograms can be trademarked. In short, a trademark is a different way of referring to your company’s brand.
According to the TM Act, 1999 a trademark must be a mark which includes a device, brand, heading, label, ticket, signature, word, letter, name, numeral, packaging or combination of colours or any combination of any of these attributes.
Graphically Represented:
It must have the ability to be graphically represented – Despite the fact that this is a legal requirement in India, there are unorthodox trademarks such as scent markings (for a particular brand’s aroma) and sound marks (for Nokia’s melody). The legality of such trademarks being challenged in an Indian court, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
Product Differentiation:
It must serve the goal of differentiating one manufacturer’s products from those of another – The primary goal of trademark laws is to identify one seller’s goods from that of other sellers, and they are judged from the perspective of purchasers. PayTM, an Indian firm, has been engaged in a trademark lawsuit with PayPal over the latter’s usage of blue and the placement of letters in the company logo in a very similar manner, but more importantly, the use of the first word “Pay.”
Ensure That Your Trademark Is Protected at All Times:
Shape, colour combination and packaging may be protected as TM’s– This includes examples such as Coca Cola registering its distinctive shape of bottles in a 3D form, such that all other soft drinks cannot use the shape of Coca Cola bottles. However, Cadbury lost a legal battle while protecting the distinctive purple coloured wrappers of its signature chocolate.
Register Your Tagline as a Trademark:
It’s not a trademark; it’s a tagline; why bother trademarking it? Mr. or Ms. Entrepreneur, consider this: if you have a wonderful tagline, wouldn’t you want to protect it? Many products and services rely on taglines, which have become practically iconic.
Establish a Link:
It should be capable of projecting the connection of a person/group of persons with the manufacture of the goods or provision of services – Parle G has acquired distinctiveness for its globally renowned biscuits.
In a legal battle in 1972, the court held that a wrapper of another biscuit applying the same colour scheme would be considered deceptive. For this, the court placed the two wrappers side by side and realised that it would be misleading for a person usually dealing with one to accept the other if offered to him.
Thus, it is advisable to choose distinctive marks, from very early on in the business to secure rights arising out of long use. It is also important to run a trademark search and avoid any possible similarities with an already registered trademark.
Ways to Avoid Common Trademark Pitfalls
Here are some ways to avoid common trademark and service mark pitfalls:
- Build a creative, interesting, and powerful trademark that avoids becoming generic
- Avoid using generic words
- No matter how good or bad a term is, avoid using it or be careful with the language you use
- Consider trademarking your website’s address as well as your slogan or tagline
- Don’t ignore trademark ownership
- Do your research to see if other existing products have similar names
- Trademark your tagline
- Respond to all actions taken by the trademark office
- Do not forget to renew your trademark.
Conclusion
The trademark registration process takes a little time, but it protects the long-term safety and sustainability of your brand’s product or service. Furthermore, this approach should be considered by every business. Indeed, they should only seek the help of a trustworthy partner like Vakilsearch for this. They will let you know about how to register trademark. With Vakilsearch you get the best support throughout the process and we guide you until the registration process is complete.
