Check all goods and services when deciding on trade Mark registration
Filing trade marks are a little like baking a meringue. The recipe may seem easy to follow, but if you make even a small mistake, you might not get the results you had hoped for.
Here’s a case in point. The owners of a café that we often frequent filed their own trade mark application which successfully proceeded to registration. One day over coffee the owner asked us to look up this café's trade mark registration and offer our opinion. On review, while they did indeed have a trade mark registration, we were surprised to see that it only protected one food good that they sold, but the registration did not cover the class of services which they provided (namely, selling food and beverages). In addition, their logo was not protected on its own; it was only protected with the associated words.
Lessons to be learnt:
It pays to get advice from an IP lawyer who can help you to correctly identify the classes of good and services applicable to your business. This may be in more than one category. You also may have more than one trade mark that need protection (i.e. word, logo and combination of the word and logo).
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