How many cups of coffee and scribbles on a paper did it take for you to zero-in to design your logo? A dozen, right? If you don’t register your trademark, then someone else can. It is universally accepted that a unique brand and logo is the most valuable asset for the entity as customers can swiftly recognise your product or services among competitor’s products. It has become very important to protect your brand name and logo from misuse or duplication by others. Registration of a trademark confers a number of advantages over the use of an unregistered Brand name and Logo.
Advantages of Registering Trademark in India include:
- Exclusive rights to use the trademark
- Registered trademark owns brand value
- Securing business goodwill
- Gives its owners legal protection
- Ease of making advertisement and strong public relations
- In India, the trademarks are registered by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks.
- Registration of a trademark can be done either offline (physical) or online, i.e., E-filing (Online trademark registration). Offline registration of the trademark can be done at the offices of the trademark registrar based on the jurisdiction whereas E-filing is useful and arguably a more sensible method in the contemporaneous times.
What can be registered as a trademark?
- Name : A name including personal or surname of the applicant or predecessor in business or the signature of the person e.g, the name Narender Modi can be trademarked.
- Word : A word which is not being directly descriptive of the character or quality of the goods / service. For example Google is a word which has been trademarked.
- Numbers : Alphanumeric or Letters or numerals or any combination thereof. For example 555 brand.
- Images : Image, symbol, monograms, 3-dimensional shapes, letters etc. For example the tick in Nike logo.
- Sound : Sound marks in audio format. For ex the sound in the ad jingle
Except these, the other things which can be trademarked are an invented word or any arbitrary dictionary word or words, letters or numerals, devices which may include fancy devices or symbols, monograms, a combination of colors or a single color in combination with a word or device, the shape of goods or their packaging, 3- dimensional sign, slogans and phrase, logo, graphic content, etc.
Procedure For Trademark Registration in India
- Complete our trademark Form : You need to fill our simple online trademark application form & submit documents.
- Conduct your trademark search : To make sure that unique logo name filed is available or not, Trademark Search is executed by experts.
- Select Appropriate Class : Depending on nature of your products, we shall suggest the appropriate class of the 45 classes
- Trademark Application filed : We create your Trademark application in 3 days and get your TM number
- Trademark registration completed : The usual trademark approval usually takes about 6 to 18 months. The validity of the trademark registration term in India is 10 years.
