Why Your Business Name Deserves Professional Trademark Registration
Should you register your trademark yourself?
I regularly meet businesses that have either registered their own trademark or who tell me they intend to do so.
While I tend not to comment individually the fact is, I’ve never come across a solid trademark registration that’s been drafted without the help of professionals.
The name is the most valuable asset of most businesses because a business’ reputation attaches to its name. The name is how we uniquely identify a business as the source of its products and services.
Say you enjoy a chocolate and want to buy it again. You will only be able to do so if you know the name it originated from – for example, Cadbury or Lindt. Alternatively, if you recognise its packaging you could find it again.
For most businesses, their name is how consumers identify them.
Early-stage businesses may not have the budget to access good quality legal help. So, it’s better to do something to protect the name than nothing. That’s why I don’t dissuade prospective clients from doing their own trademark filing.
However, it’s essential to spend time and energy to get the best possible registration you can achieve, and to accept that you will need to replace the registration with a professionally drafted one later, especially if you want to extend your protection internationally.
A DIY registration will rarely be a suitable foundation for an international application. That’s because of the way the trademark system works. Protection in other countries rests on the base registration. So, unless that base registration is well drafted and covers all necessary classes it won’t be an appropriate foundation for brand protection worldwide.
The internet changed many aspects of our lives including the role of intellectual property in business.
Nowadays the value of most businesses lies in their intellectual property – in assets such as the brand, website, know-how, trade secrets and the like. So, it’s crucial to appropriately protect intellectual property.
There’s a lot to understand about IP such as in names. Names are not protected by copyright but by trademark laws. Trademarks are the basis for protecting methodologies, slogans, packaging, symbols and the like.
The law impacts whether a name or sign is capable of functioning as a trademark, and hence of being protected.
Choosing a name that isn’t a suitable vehicle sets you up for a host of problems including lower sales and lack of recourse against copycats. Adopting unsuitable identifiers is a serious mistake. So legal help should be sought earlier on, rather than just to protect something that’s already been chosen.
The approach of the law is similar worldwide, as is clear from my conversation with this week’s podcast guest Paola Zaragoza Cardenales. She is a dual qualified New York attorney and Puerto Rican lawyer.
In this episode we discuss the similarities and differences between the legal landscape in Puerto Rico and other countries like the UK.
Topics we cover include:
- Common misconceptions about IP
- The role of intellectual property for startups
- The importance of integrating IP into business plans
- IP needs of the farming industry
- Geographic indication of foods
Here is a link to the podcast and if you prefer to watch on YouTube, here is a link to the podcast channel we’ve recently set up.
