What You Need To Know About a Trademark

Introduction

Trademarks may be classified into several categories according to different criteria. First, depending on the person applying for registration, they may be individual trademark when the applicant is a individual or a legal entity,collective-where the applicant is an association or certification, when the applicant seeks to certify a characteristic of the goods or services for which it is used. Additionally, in terms of form, the label may be verbal when it consists only of words, combined, when it consists of words and images and figurative, black and white or color, it consists only in drawings; figurative marks can be three-dimensional.

 

History

Registering a trademark means to have a registration certificate issued by the authorized institutions. This certificate entitles you to have exclusive rights to use the registered name and the brand becomes the private property of the person who posted it. Whenever you find that another company or person is using the mark commercially you can use all the legislative levers necessary to prevent third parties from using it without your permission. Failure to register the mark, name or image that is used can be addressed as living in a building on which you have no proof of ownership: anytime someone can come to claim the right to be there.

Features

If you don t register a trademark you can always receive a notification that another firm with a similar name, which properly registered as a trademark, requiring you, according to the Trademark Law and Unfair Competition Law, to immediately stop using the name (image) to eliminate possible confusion among customers, suppliers, financial institutions, authorities. In addition, you may be required to pay damages in direct proportion to the damage created.

The market value of a trademark is the revenue that this denomination has the ability to attract; regardless of the company that uses it. Many times the brand value is negotiated separately from the rest because it generates revenue independently.

Accounting and financial the trademark is treated as an intangible asset, which generates revenue for the company and thus has a value in itself - sometimes surprisingly high in relation to tangible assets (tangible): 80 percent of the entire heritage for very big brands and the values of these brands are hundreds of millions of Euros.

A big company had problems some years ago due to the fact that a newly created sign (figurative mark) was not registered in time. They used a two-word trademark and they tried to obtain the exclusive right for the two words separately. After they saw they couldn't get one word, they tried to trademark the second one, but they were surprised to see that the word was registered by a company worker and they had to pay half a million dollars to get back their name.

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