Trademark search: Making your desired trademark unique!
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If you approach a trademark professional with a request to register a trademark, you will be advised to start with a comprehensive trademark search. Most likely, your trademark professional will mention that this is also a crucial step in the trademark registration process. Even though this step is essential, you can move with registration without it. In April’s blog post, we’ll explain why you shouldn’t proceed with registering your desired trademark without conducting a comprehensive trademark search.
Why is a unique trademark important?
Your trademark will distinguish you from your competitors, it will create an association between the trademark and the quality of your products/services. Moreover, it will also build your reputation and relationship with consumers. Therefore, it is extremely important to create a unique trademark. Based on our practice, it can be quite challenging to do so without the assistance of a trademark professional.
How to know if a trademark is indeed unique?
From time to time, we are faced with clients who want to register their trademarks in the belief that they are unique and distinctive, while identical or similar trademarks already exist on the market. This means that the desired trademarks require modifications to become indeed unique and distinctive.
Trademark searches are dedicated to help understand whether the desired trademark is unique enough. There are two types of searches: preliminary and comprehensive.
Preliminary trademark search
At Fondia, we conduct preliminary trademark searches prior to filing each and every trademark application. This kind of search is focused on the desired trademark itself and does not analyze close variations, which means that the result of the preliminary search gives a general understanding of whether the desired trademark could be registered as a trademark (e.g. some of the IP offices in the world do not evaluate earlier identical and similar trademarks during examination process), but it does not guarantee that the desired trademark is indeed unique. Furthermore, it does not guarantee the success of the registration process, nor does it provide risk estimations for potential legal processes on trademark infringements. These issues are analyzed in a comprehensive trademark search.
Comprehensive trademark search
A comprehensive trademark search is usually conducted by analyzing data in public and private databases that contain not only trademarks, but also company names, domain names, marks that are not registered as trademarks but are proactively used in other businesses, social media, publications, etc.
Basically, a comprehensive trademark search is extensive research carried out by trademark professionals, the results of which allow you to adopt an informative decision to proceed with your desired trademark or to hold on and modify it so that it becomes a solid background for the success of your business.
In summary, if you want to create a unique trademark, be sure that it will be registered by the respective IP office and be sure that it will not breach the intellectual property rights of others, so don’t skip this important step in the trademark registration process.
You can schedule an online meeting with the Fondia Baltics IPR team at a time convenient for you by clicking on the Calendly link. You can also submit your question directly by sending an email to LTIPR@fondia.com.
