Ensuring the protection of your own brand implies mandatory knowledge of how to register a trademark. A registered trademark has many advantages, primarily for the entrepreneur himself. Later in the article you will learn the features of the process of registering a brand.
Pros of having a registered trademark
A considerable part of businessmen, in spite of their deep knowledge in running their own business, do not have an idea of why the trademark is registered and what its positive aspects are.
1. Trademark protection. Nobody dares to steal your sign, because the illegal exploitation of someone else's brand entails civil and administrative liability. In exceptional cases, even criminal may be provided.
2. Use of the mark in all areas of activity. Having registered his own trademark, he has the right to use the designation anywhere: on the product packaging, in company documents, in the field of advertising, as well as create signboards and a domain name on the World Wide Web, and this is very beneficial for running your own business, since in the modern world the Internet takes one of the leading positions.
3. Trust of the target consumer. People who intend to buy your product or use the service of your company will definitely have a positive impression when they find out that the trademark is registered. This fact is associated with customers with a serious attitude of the company to their work and plans for long-term activities, as well as with high quality products.
So, the entrepreneur is in a favorable position, not stingy with the registration of a trademark.
Place of registration of a trademark
In the Russian Federation, the place where trademarks are registered is Rospatent. To register a trademark yourself, you must contact the above federal service for intellectual property and submit an application. It will be reviewed within 12 months. However, few people contact Rospatent with such cases directly, because they find it much easier to use the services of private lawyers. Their help consists in the correct preparation of the application and the collection of the required package of documents. This information will be useful to those who are thinking about how to register a trademark on their own in Russia. A trademark approved in the Russian service is valid only on the territory of the Russian Federation. Those who decide to bring the business to the world level, you need to contact the following organization.
WIPO (or the World Intellectual Property Organization) is an international trademark registration service that provides entrepreneurs with their protection. All applications are submitted to the bureau of this organization. It is recommended, as in the previous case, to seek help from professional law firms.
Registration cost
Speaking about how to register your trademark in Russia, it is worth noting that in Rospatent, entrepreneurs need to pay 3 fees for the following procedures:
1. Registration of the application.
2. A detailed review of it.
3. Registration of a trademark and issuance of a certificate.
The approximate total cost will be from 20,000 rubles.
Who can apply for registration
In order to register a mark, you must be a legal entity. The application is submitted either by the owner of the company or by its representative. In addition, this can be done by a trustee or patent attorney. The latter is a specialist certified by the State Patent Office, which has the right to register trademarks and conduct business related to patents. The attorney must have a state certificate that confirms his rights.
As for the question of how to register a trademark for an individual entrepreneur, here the registration procedure is absolutely similar to the case with a legal entity. An individual entrepreneur can also submit an application on his own or entrust this matter to an authorized person.
Types of Trademarks
There are several types:
1. Verbal. It is the most common. Includes brand names, company fonts and slogans.
2. Fine. This view implies only a picture without the use of inscriptions.
3. Mixed. This includes combinations of pictures and letters - logos.
It is important to note that you can register not only the mark, but also its color, as well as the packaging form of the product.
How to register a trademark: from filing an application to obtaining a certificate
Before contacting the Intellectual Property Service, it is necessary, in fact, to come up with a trademark and check for uniqueness in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism. If after the check no similar trademarks were found, you can safely proceed to the registration procedure itself, which is a sequence of steps:
1. Preparation of the application. An application is a package of documents that contains information about a legal entity or individual entrepreneur and a registered trademark. The required kit includes:
- Statement.
- Directly designation.
- Description of the mark.
- The list of classes of MKTU, according to which the trademark is registered.
The application should be written on the model of Rospatent.
2. Consideration of the application or its formal examination. The employees of Rospatent accept the application and the package of documents, and then assign the registration number to the application , which they inform the applicant in case they need to supplement the documentation package or make any adjustments. Also on this number find the application in an extensive database. Then it is sent for a formal examination, where they verify the correctness of its preparation.
3. Substantive consideration. This stage is a thorough examination of the trademark for matches with other brands. This process is complicated, as well as the whole solution to the question of how to register a trademark. The brand should not be mixed with existing brands so as not to mislead consumers.
4. As a result of consideration of the application, the intellectual property service decides on the registration of a trademark. It is entered into the register and a certificate is issued to the applicant that the trademark is officially registered.
Trademark Registration Rules in Russia
To understand how to register a trademark, you need to know the rules in force on the territory of the Russian Federation.
It is forbidden to register a brand for individuals, unlike domain names. This raises the question of how to register a name as a trademark. Name trademarks, of course, exist, but the essence of these cases is that they are registered with an individual entrepreneur or company. It follows that the use of your name as a trademark is permitted. One has only to think about how the first or last name will look like a trademark.
Persons planning to launch their own brand need to familiarize themselves with article 1483 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which provides a list of signs that are not allowed for registration.
List of required documentation
In addition to the above components of the application, Rospatent requires the following documents:
1. A receipt confirming that the fee has been paid.
2. In the case of a collective designation, the charter of the mark.
3. In the case of filing an application with a patent attorney - a power of attorney signed by the head of the company.
In the absence of these materials, misunderstandings may arise during the registration process, so it is extremely important to check the availability of all necessary.
Features of trademark registration in other countries
For comparison, a few words about how to register a trademark outside of Russia. In Germany, the application is considered faster than in the Russian Federation - about 7 months, while in eastern countries such as India, the examination is carried out for several years.
In Russia and the USA, the use of foreign brands for commercial purposes is prohibited, since misleading entails punishment. In addition, three-dimensional trademarks are recognized in Russia, unlike Japan and the United Kingdom. There, protection of signs of this kind is carried out only if they represent industrial designs.
In some countries, the use of a surname as a trademark is prohibited. This is due to the fact that such an action violates the rights of people bearing the same surname.