Tag: trademark
Can descriptive trademarks be registered in India?
Descriptive trademarks are those that describe the characteristics, qualities, or features of a product or service. In India, descriptive trademarks can be registered under the Trade Marks Act, 1999, but are subject to certain restrictions and conditions. One of the main restrictions for registering a descriptive trademark in India is that it must have acquired…
Weaker Trademark! Are you stuck with a descriptive name?
A trademark that is descriptive of its goods and/or services cannot be trademarked as per Section 9 of the Trademarks Act, 1999. In the old trademark act, i.e., Trade and Merchandise Marks Act, 1958, which is fully replaced by the current 1999 Act, had allowed descriptive marks in Part B of the register. In Section 9…
Whether it is correct to use registered trademark ® symbol without registration?
Trademark registration involves several stages from application to publication before it is finally registered (see our earlier post on stages involved). It takes upwards of 12 to 18 months for a trademark to attain registration in India, provided that there is no objection or opposition. Symbols such as TM and ® are used by trademark…
TM5 – a new framework by key players in trademarks
The TM5 is a conglomerating of the world’s top five trademark offices 1) China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) 2) Europe’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) 3) the Japan Patent Office (JPO) 4) South Korea’s Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) 5) the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). These offices reportedly…
Check our application status at ease now, thanks to Indian Trademark Office!
Over the past months we have been writing periodically about the digitization process happening at the office of Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (CGPDTM) (here and here), more specifically about trademarks. Now, the Indian trademark registry has made available yet another online dashboard utility named as “Stock and Flow of Trademarks” to show…
Trademark objections at its peak at 98%
It is not unusual for a trademark practitioner who have practiced before other jurisdictions to notice that the percentage of objections issued by the Indian Trademark Office is extremely higher when compared to other trademark offices such as USPTO, IPO, IP Australia, EU. We randomly picked a few monthly objection lists involving around 1000 applications from…