Remember our loyal companion with chai for decades a quench for our mild appetites, yes, I am talking about our evergreen Parle-G. Whats the first thing we notice while buying ParleG? It’s the giggling, pretty, little girl on pack of every Parle-G. Or could you ever forget the mouth-watering yummy tagline ‘Utterly Butterly Delicious’? And the girl, dressed in a polkadotted frock.
These are the identities of one of biggest brands in India. These are there trademarks.
So. What is a trademark? We can say anything that connects you with the brand. In a broader sense we can say trademark can be anything that distinguishes your product or service from those of others.
A trademark is a type of intellectual property consisting of a Identifiable mark, design, or expression that protects the unique identity of product under the class to which it relates.
Being an individual or being a legal entity you can be the owner of the trade mark but the trademark cannot be deceptive to the already existing one, you may have seen abibas shoes instead of adidas shoes on a road side shoe vender, yes that could land the manufacturer and that vendor in some serious trouble. So the purpose of the trademark is to protect your brand identity legally against such infringers. Owner of trademark can protect his/her brand name not just in India but also globally.
There are 45 classes in which goods and services are classified under which class 1 to 34 relates to goods and class 35 to 45 relates to services A trademark may be located on a package, a label, a voucher, or on the product itself. service marks are the Trademarks which are used to identify services .
The symbols (TM) (the trademark symbol) and ® (the registered trademark symbol) can be used to identify trademarks; the latter is only for use by the owner of a trademark that has been registered.
Application for trademark is a simple procedure. It can be made by owner of brand himself/herself or through agent.
The owner of a trademark can take legal action against unauthorised use of trademark. Most countries require formal registration of a trademark as a condition for taking this action. A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination