Have you ever thought about the importance of registering your brand? By doing this, you’ll access a variety of benefits you may not have realized were possible. The best way to keep your property safe and protected is registering it from the moment you’ve decide on it.
Trademarks and service marks: key to registering your brand
Trademarks and service marks are two versions of a kind of intellectual knowledge property. They assert your ownership of brands, logos, and slogans, and they help you protect them from being stolen.
A trademark is essentially any “word, name, symbol, or any combination which is used or intended to be used to identify and distinguish the goods of one company from those of others”.
Most businesses have some kind of identification that makes their business stand out, both for advertising purposes and for general business purposes. Therefore, registering your brand allows you to use it on any application without having any future problems.
Reasons to trademark a brand
Here are some reasons to register your trademark:
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Exclusive property:
By registering a trademark, the legal system recognizes the owner. Being the owner allows you to freely dispose of your name or symbol on any place.
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Protection against use by third parts.
There may be other trademarks in the world, registration of a trademark gives the owner the right to prevent any person from using an identical or confusingly similar mark. Imagine that your brand has grown and is not yet registered. Another person comes and sets up a business with the same logo and the same name, taking all the profits because you didn’t do it before, so now you have lost all rights of that name and logo.
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Transfers and licenses for the use of the brand.
This means that the owner of the trademark can give the rights to a third party or sell it. The registration of the trademark guarantees the buyer the legality of the transmission.
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Value of the intangible.
A brand can worth millions of dollars. Many famous companies have increased their value because of this, creating an important legacy. Control of legal aspects have great importance too, since it allows the company to consolidate the loyalty of the user or consumer through the preservation of the identity of the products.
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Duration of protection.
The registration allows the use of the trademark for 10 years after the expiration of that period and it can be renewed.
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The registration process.
The National Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) is responsible in Mexico of processing all trademarks registrations. Registering a brand has an average duration of 12 to 24 months.
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Professional assistance.
The advice of a professional in this area is highly recommended, since a specialist has the relevant technical tools and knowledge to determine the registration possibilities of the chosen brand. The INPI has articles and rules that must be followed. A professional will help compare the brand with those registered in the same activity category and can accompany the employer throughout the process, interposing the administrative resources and the necessary papers for the brand to be registered by the agency.
Before launching a start-up, you must ensure that a brand with a similar or identical name doesn’t exist, since all the growth that this project has will be linked to that brand.
Registering it before someone else does will allow you avoid undesirable situations like having to face lawsuits from third parties, or someone stealing your name and idea.
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