How do you prevent possible trademark infringement in India?

Jun 172019

Trademarks are something every entrepreneur is concerned about. Entrepreneurship is in a boom in India currently and more and more people are getting to it. Although, being an entrepreneur is what everybody wants but being a successful entrepreneur involves a lot of challenges specially in India. Being a startup, you always crave for innovative ideas and keep your mind running to come up with new ideas and inventions to give a boost to your company. For a possible infringement, you can hire a professional Patent Attorney in India to take care of the legal issues for you. You always want to be the best in the business and do not want to leave any stone unturned when it comes to proving yourself in the market in front of your competitors.

You want to be unique, easy and reachable in the market. To maintain your uniqueness in the market, the first thing you do or must do is to register your trademark so that nobody else can copy your ideas, designs, logo or brand name. In this way, you will always be secured in terms of your uniqueness and will always stand out from the crowd feeling secured and relaxed.

What is a Trademark?

Trademark can be a name, logo, words, symbol or an idea that represent a particular good or service. The marks associated with your brand makes you unique in the market and in front of your competitors. Not only this, registering a trademark has several benefits and which is why almost all the entrepreneurs in India, registered their trademarks which have become an essential step towards starting a company.

Registering your Trademark

Now when we have understood what exactly a Trademark is, it is very important to understand the benefits and process of it. One of the major factors to win an infringement of Trademark involves registration of your Trademark. Without it, even if somebody violates the law and misuses your logos or designs, you will not be in the state to take legal action against them as you being a company have not registered your trademark.

Registering your trademark is not an easy process and involves many formalities in India but everything is worth once you are registered. There are many things involved in the process and we will discuss them one by one to give a clear understanding of the whole process. In order to apply for the Trademark registration, there are few things you must keep in mind.

Proper research

Before applying for the trademark, make sure that you have done proper research about your idea and its uniqueness. Sometimes, it so happens that you unknowingly think of something which in the end comes out to be registered already. For example, you might come up with a name for your brand which you think is unique but when you go for registration, you find out that it has already been taken. In such cases, you sometimes might even have to face legal consequences if you try to register a trademark for the already registered name.

The Uniqueness of your brand name

As discussed above, trademark registration is all based on the uniqueness of your brand name and you cannot register a name that is not unique or already in use. Many people can come up with the same thought and that is very normal but always try to be the first one who registers that thought and that will make you stand out from the crowd. If you have come up with the idea, it is always advisable to take assistance from a professional Patent Attorney in India who might be able to help you better in this regard because being a startup, you might not be familiar with all the legal processes of trademark registration.

How to ensure Infringement

In India, trademark infringement is quite common as the people have higher chances of escaping out easily as they copy the trademark and run smaller business which does get noticed easily neither to the law nor to the actual brand.

If you have registered your trademark and you think that an actual infringement has occurred, the first thing you must do is to ensure yourself that it has occurred so that you can file an infringement and take legal action against the person or the brand.

Avoid Confusion

You must very well know the fact that infringement can never be considered if the two brands are using the same names for different purposes. There can be one “Sony electronics” and “Sony cloth Shop” as a consumer will never buy clothing mistaking it with an electronic shop and both the names can easily coexist in the market without anyone being violating the trademark infringement rules. So, if you come across another name that resembles your brand name, do not jump to file an infringement case but check thoroughly to ensure if that name uses the same goods and services like yours.

Comparison

When you have found out that some other brand is using your name or idea, you must first compare its services with the ones you provide. It might happen that only a few of the services are identical while other services are completely different from what you offer. In such cases, hiring a professional helps a lot as he would study the case and try to find similarities and differences between both the brands. If the services are mostly identical, you can surely go and file an infringement on the brand that is misusing your name.

Exceptions

There are cases with exceptions at times which might be confusing to you but are absolutely clear to the court and the decision making authorities. In most of the cases, infringements can be filed on completely identical ideas but are not true in all cases. You can file an infringement even if the other brand is not identical as yours. If the packaging is made identical to yours, if the sound of the brand is similar to your phonetically or its meaning can create confusion for the customers, infringement is considered true. Courts often consider sight, sound and meaning while hearing for infringement cases.

Trademark Infringement is vast and preventing it is not an easy task. Hiring a professional helps in most of the cases and detailed studies are done before filing an infringement. But if done with proper research, you can easily win the case and earn the penalty charged on the other brand.