Why should your trademark be unique and distinctive?

Our personal experience It has been quite an interesting journey for all of us since we started our career into intellectual property.  Each of our lawyers encounter on a day to day basis clients from different levels and parts of society involved in different businesses. Counseling and brainstorming a client is quite a task which consumes seventy percentage (70%) of our lawyers' time before proceeding with a trademark application.  We must admit that we, at our very best, manage to convince 60% of the clients to not go for marks that are directly or indirectly infringing on existing registered marks or well-known trademarks. Some clients are persistent on their stance even when advised by us about the potential consequences of objections...

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Trademark Bullying – are you being bullied?

What is trademark bullying? Bullying, in general, means an act of intimidating a weaker person to do or not to do something.  This term is quite familiar to most of us, especially in the context of school, colleges, workplaces, etc.  Bullying seems to be an epidemic and has invaded the trademark industry as well.  Normally, well-informed clients and/or attorneys do not engage in this behavior. Trademark bullying, in our own words, means a form of threat, instigation, or communication initiated by, in most cases, a registered trademark owner against others who generally may not be registered owners, to do or to stop doing something that is, without any reasonable cause, likely to or is infringing the trademark of registered trademark...

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In “Advocates as Patent Agents” Case- IPO says “it has been appealed”

SP Chockalingam vs. Controller of Patents March 15, 2013 was a much-awaited date for the legal fraternity when Honourable Madras High Court pronounced a verdict on a writ Petition filed under Article 226 of the Constitution of India, seeking for issuance of a Writ of Declaration, that the amendment introduced to Section 126 of the Patents Act, 1970, by Section 67 (a) of the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005 (Act 15 of 2005) as illegal, unconstitutional, ultra vires and void. After several months have passed by, our Indian Patent Office (IPO) has not made a public statement as to whether it was going to appeal or implement the decision, to our knowledge.  In the interim, many advocates were curious to know...

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Different stages of trademark application in India

A trademark application after it is filed has to see through several stages of scrutiny before it is finally registered.  So, the applicant and or the applicant's counsel needs to diligently follow up with every stage of the application.  After the implementation of online filing, a.k.a. e-filing of trademarks, objections and other notifications are published online. Some of the common stages are as given below: 1)  Online New Application or New Application  - indicates that the application is filed and/or the data entry has been done. 2) Send to Vienna Codification - only applies to non-text trademarks, containing logo or label or artwork.  This means your non-text trade mark is being assigned with codes as per vienna codification 3) Formalities...

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Cybersquatting vs Trademark Registration – How trademark registration can shield you from cybersquatting?

                                               How registration of trademarks can kill cybersquatters? [caption id="attachment_353" align="aligncenter" width="637"] trademarking and cybersquatting in india[/caption] What is cybersquatting? Cybersquatting is an internet terminology that involves registering a domain name of interest to someone else (e.g. a business of that name) in the hope of selling it for a profit.  This is mostly done with an intention, inter alia, to place online ads, divert traffic, cause confusion, damage reputation online, etc. Can you register your name under all extensions? Gone are the days where TLDs( top level domain names) were limited to .com, .net., .org.  The TLD list is growing every...

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Caution: Using registered trademarks as keywords for online advertisements?

Using Trademarks as Keywords E-commerce has been continuously evolving over the past few years, so has been the trademark laws worldwide.  This has been a common practice among the online business entities to use the competitors' brand name, slogan, domain name, product name as keywords.  This strategy is essentially a trick of displaying aids targeted towards users searching for a certain keyword of your competitors. [caption id="attachment_349" align="alignleft" width="452"] Using other's trademarks as keywords in online advertising[/caption]   Typically, online digital media advertising companies such as Google Adwords, etc. do not object to it as they put up a defense stating that they cannot literally verify each keyword used by the advertisers as to whether it is a "trademark" or...

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