The curious case of trademark violation!
A trademark is a name, sign or design which differentiates your products and services from the products and services of others. You exclusively use it to brand and sell your products and you can sue anyone infringing it.
Recently, I started working on a project to develop a trademark search engine and I found it to be one of the most interesting search problems to solve. Soon you will get an answer to what makes it so interesting!
You generally search for a trademark when you are naming your startup and want to ensure that you are not infringing a name. It’s a different question that should you trademark your startup when naming it, as you already have to deal with Chartered Accountant and getting a trademark would require a lawyer on board and hence an additional expense. Secondly, you search for a trademark to ensure that no one is infringing your name.
Now, how do you know that a trademark is being infringed? The simple answer is, if the product name is likely to confuse the customer then it’s an infringement. To resolve what causes a confusion, the goods and services are classified into 45 categories and if names in the same goods and services are related then it’s a violation. Another scenario of violation is when you are utilizing other’s name to your advantage or diluting it’s brand.
Recently, I happened to visit Chennai for a personal work and stayed in a hotel, almost 1.5 kms from Marina beach. Since the beach was nearby, I decided to walk to it. I love walking, as while doing so, I can move at my own pace, observe and experience the surroundings, stop wherever I feel like, grab some local delicacies and so on. I must not miss mentioning that most importantly it helps stay fit.
As I traversed through the lane which goes to the beach, I found in-numerous cases of trademark violation similar to the one in the image above, where you see an almost replica of Google logo and even a search box. As Google is in almost all businesses, even shopping (remember the Google online sale), this store causes the confusion and it is also diluting the brand Google. After clicking the picture of this store, I moved ahead. By the time I reached the beach, I learnt that narrower the Indian lane is, more is the violation. Every other locality in Chennai has a Saravana store, every other locality in Bangalore has a food joint with name Darshini and almost all localities in India has at-least one Ganesh Enterprises. I never saw things from this perspective before.
Back to the search engine, such cases of violations, where a portion of the name, similar sounding name or related names are used, can be detected easily but there are cases when the names can be quite different but still violation is pursued more severely. For example, Apple recently fought and won a case again iVoice Ventures in Tamil Nadu. Does this means that Apple has trademarked almost all name starting with “i”? This is a very difficult scenario for a search engine to detect and if such a rule is applied the system will extract a major chunk of documents in the corpus as a match and whoever is looking for a violation need to scan through thousands of documents.
It’s found that in India the number of violations are very high but they are less reported where as in the US the violations are less but they are more aggressively reported. In both the cases, you should be careful and if your business applies to both geographies even more careful. On top of this, another critical issue is you owning the trademark but someone else owning the domain name. Hence, do your homework before you launch your startup.
And by the time, I devise a mechanism to detect such violations, if you want to ensure that you are not infringing a trademark or your trademark is not being infringed, run a search at http://www.uspto.gov/. If can are in India, run your search at http://ipindiaonline.gov.in/.
This post originally appeared in LinkedIn Pulse.
