Protecting Your Business: How to Register Trademarks and Intellectual Property

With advanced technology, scammers are finding it easier to infringe on people’s businesses and conduct fraudulent activities. Apart from confusing customers, scammers may pose as your business and defraud customers, which may ruin a brand’s reputation and cause legal implications for the business owner.

Many business owners tend to think that after company incorporation, their business is protected. While business registration gives legal protection, business owners have to understand that it does not protect their trademark. Trademarks are a type of intellectual property that is intangible but very crucial in brand protection, recognition, and development.

In this guide, we will highlight the steps to take for trademark registration in the UK and how long it will take.

An overview of trademark registration

A trademark is a symbol, design, or expression that distinguishes a business, product, or service from others in the market. Like company registration, a trademark provides a business with legal protection from infringers.

There are three types of trademarks, which include:

–          Design: logo, symbol, image

–          Word: names, slogans, phrases

–          Combination mark: inclusive of both design and word.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) is responsible for registering trademarks. The registration gives a company exclusive rights to use the trademark on its goods or services in the UK and protects its reputation.

When registering for a trademark, business owners will come across the term ‘classes’. Classes are categories of related goods or services that are used to limit intellectual property rights. Trademark registration is done in specific classes, where each class has a list of associated goods or services. Some business activities may be similar in terms of the products they use, but be in different classes regarding how the product is used. Business owners need to check the description of each class to choose the appropriate one. Goods are in classes 1 to 34, while services are in classes 35 to 45.

For example, if your business activity is retail services for footwear or sports shoes, it will be in class 35; however, if you produce your own footwear and sports shoes, your business will be in class 25.

Securing intellectual property

Inventing creations for your business is a time-consuming journey that takes a lot of energy and money to make your brand unique. It is important to protect your hard work so that people do not steal or mimic your inventions. Inventions can be anything you write, manufacture, design, or even the name of your brand.

There are different types of intellectual property, which are trademarks, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets.

–          Trademark protects the company’s brand, product, or services

–          Copyrights protect the original work of the creator

–          Patents protect the business’s inventions

–          Trade secrets protect a company’s intellectual property that is not public and has economic value.

Intellectual property can be owned in various ways, one being the obvious, as an inventor or a creator, and secondly, if it belongs to a business or a group of people, and it can be transferred or sold. For you to own an intellectual property, there are several conditions one has to fulfill. The conditions include:

–          You must be the creator or the inventor of the property and have acquired copyrights  

–          If you are not the creator, you must have bought the property rights from the previous owner

Copyrights

Copyright protects your work from unathorise use. Copyright protection is an automatic process; it does not require registration or fees.  Copyright protection comes when you create

–          original literary, musical, dramatic, illustration, and photography

–          film and television recordings

–          sound and music recordings

–          published edition layouts of written, musical, and dramatic works

–          original non-literary written work, such as web content, database, and software

–          broadcasts

For people to know that it is your work, you can mark your work with the copyright symbol (©), your name, and the year of creation.

Patents

A patent protects an invention of an individual or a company from being used without permission. To get patent protection, your invention must be a novelty, meaning it should be new and should not have been disclosed to the public before your application date.

Your invention must not be an obvious modification of what the public knows, and the idea must be drawn, written, or embodied.

Trade secrets

Trade secrets are confidential business information that gives a company a competitive advantage. They are protected by the Trade Secrets (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2018.

A trade secret can be a secret ingredient in a recipe, design, pattern, compilation of information, a chemical compound in a product, commercial data, product information, technical know-how, or product names.

Trade secrets are protected by contract, the law of confidence, the Trade Secret Regulations, or the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Trade secrets can be protected for as long as they remain secret. Once the information becomes public, it loses its protection.

Trademark registration in the UK

Registering a trademark may seem easy since there are many online registrations where you get to fill out your application and submit it. You may use this path, but it is advisable to use outsourced third parties to instruct, guide, and help you register for the trademark. They help to intensively search for whether the proposed trademark is similar to existing ones. In case it is similar to any of the existing companies, they will advise you on changing the mark to avoid any conflict.

Since trademarks are categorised into classes, you will have to choose whether you are protecting your company’s goods or services. This will depend on your business activities.

Once you have gathered all the necessary information to register your trademark, you can explore outsourced services that will assist you in completing an online application and preparing and filing the trademark application with the UK IPO. On your company’s behalf, they will receive the UK IPO examination report, which states whether the trademark meets compliance and legal requirements.

The UK IPO will then publish the trademark application to allow anybody with objections to raise them. The objections raised by third parties are concerns such as the mark being similar to or the same as their business mark. If you receive an objection, you must address it within the specified time indicated by the UK IPO.

If no objections are raised, the trademark will be registered two months after the publication date. The time taken to approve your trademark application may vary depending on the time you take to submit your application and if your trademark receives any objections.

Trademark registration in the UK provides you with the right to take legal action against infringers. You will have to display the ® symbol alongside your brand.

Need to register your trademark in the UK? Icon Offices offers trademark registration, which simplifies the complexities of the whole application process.

For more information on trademark registration in the UK, contact them at info@iconoffices.co.uk.