Trademarks
We provide trademark search, filing and infringment litigations for the territorie of Malaysia and Singapore.
Just what is a trademark?
To put it simply, a trademark is a marking to be used on a particular item of good, the purpose being to identify it as being produced from a certain entity. When you sell a product, you have to identify it as yours, from your factory or whatever. You trademark it so that if people wants to buy back the same good, due perhaps to its quality, all they have to do is to search for the marking, instead of searching for you, whom they might not know of. It is a trader's invention, so if you tradeamrked a certain item, others can't use your trademark in the goods made by them. In other words, no copying and riding on someone else's goodwill. If you sell something, trademark it and when your brand is well received, your trademark will become a valueable intellectual property. Of course you have to put in the effort.
Branding
PatentAgentip will help you to brand your trademark in the internet using the least cost. As you know, normal branding exercises can be very costly and is certainly out of reach for most young entrepreneurs. The alternative is to brand it in the internet. Unfortunately, internet branding is a very new concept and not many people knows how to do it. You can also pay a large sum of money advertising in the search engines and yet not achieve anything. You really need to know how to effectively brand yourself in the internet without spending much money. Let PatentAgentip help you to put a lasting image of your brand on the internet without having to incur a large expense of money. Get fast Return on Investment (ROI) with internet branding. Just imagine, there are over two billion number of searches coming through the search engines every month, and growing by the second. The next generation of young people will grow up knowing the internet. They do everything there. Let them grow up with your brand. To learn what PatentAgentip can help you with affordable Internet Branding, please email here for a revelation that you can't afford to miss!
Be aware of brand and trademark high jacking!
If you are not aware of it, somebody else (could be your competitors) could use nefarous methods to lure away your customers through the internet. As more and more people are turning to the internet to search for things, and using search engines to show them where to find those things that they want, some companies are tweaking their web sites to attract unsuspecting customers. How do they do it?
Well, search engines use keywords, among many others to rank websites. Search engines sends out robots to read and archive the contents of websites. It then ranks them accordingly and when searchers type the appropriate keywords into the search field, the search engines then displays the search pages, and smart companies then use their knowledge of the workings of these search engines to outsmart their rivals. They would normally use their rival’s keyword, or even brand name to put in their own pages so that the search engines might put them up in high places, in the first three pages of the search results to lure away their rival’s customers.
And with a little bit of money, anyone can also bid for their rival’s keyword or brand names and put up a sponsored site in the search results, normally seen on the first few pages along side the natural results. Unsuspecting customers don’t normally know how to differentiate between a natural result and a sponsored result, and they just click away happily, making sponsored sites getting clients that in the first place they were not entitled to. And whilst this type of robbery is taking place and are not deemed illegal, those being robbed off are often not even aware of it. Fortunately, not everybody is being robbed off; only those with sites that are ranked high will be affected. And it is normally those sites that are ranked way down the line that will resort to such tactics. There are infringement issues with using your rival’s trade names and keywords, but from the cases that have been brought to court, the verdicts have been split both ways. So for the time being, just be aware of such tactics.An alternative is to register as a trademark those words that are your keyword for your business.
You may now file your trademark through our buying section here
It’s a headache for iPhone in China
Sometimes, if you are too popular, you get extra headaches. Take the case of Apple’s iPhone. The phone has not officially being launched in China yet, but unofficially, many units of the phone has already reach the mainland, most of them being illegally smuggled and unlocked by rich individuals and using these gadgets to flaunt around. But Apple will have a problem launching the iPhone brand in China as someone else has already registered it there. ‘Hangwang Technolgy’ is the holder of trademark i-phone in China. It sounds like the Apple phone, but with an extra hyphen after the ‘I’, and according to IP lawyers there, it would be a hassle to use the original Apple name there.
There are two ways to go about it though. One way is to negotiate with ‘Hangwang’, and jack up the sale price of iPhone just to cover commission to the trademark holder. Another way is to use a different trade name altogether. The other alternative is to go to court and seek a redress, which would be time consuming, and might proved futile. Which ever way Apple takes, it will give plenty of talking points to the intellectual property fraternity. Whatever it is, people will take note to first prepare well before they come to China. Brand squatting is well entrenched there.
July 4, 2009
Should your web host pull your line off if you do bad things?
Should your webhost be responsible if you post illegal things on your site? Are they supposed to supervise what their clients are doing? Put it a bit further, can service providers be held responsible if illegal things happen on their lines? Well, renowned Italian fashion house Louis Vuitton has just won a legal suit against a California based web-host, Fremont, whom was unaware that some group ran a couple of sites selling counterfeit goods of the fashion house. Apparently, Louis Vuitton has been so cheesed off by these counterfeiters infringing on its trademark that it had been bringing many cases up with the courts. Unfortunately, the counterfeiters just disappear as fast when they get wind of the lawsuits. Not so lucky was the poor web host. They have to pay for the misdeeds of their clients to the huge amount of $32.4 million.
Perhaps they will appeal to higher authorities, but should things come to this? Or was the court decision flawed? The court ruled that the defendant knew or at least should know what their clients do with their web sites! Could this ruling also extend to misdeeds that take place in the court’s compound done by his staff? Or is there a rule that the head of a family be held liable if one of their sons commits a crime in the house? Like the granting of a patent to someone who brought out the secrets of yoga from a foreign country that had practiced the art for centuries before, court rulings are getting their wire crossed more often than we are made to believe. What about search engines then? Are they not responsible since they are the most likely ones who had allowed the counterfeiters to advertise their goods? You should be concerned though.
September 4, 2009.
You don’t need permission to use someone else’s trade mark?
It is now official. There is no more need to get permission to use somebody’s tradename. But only in Pennsylvania State! In a Penn State Supreme Court 4-3 decision, the Trademark Counterfeiting Statute was declared unconstitutional. It seems that the law was too vague and it breached The First Amendment rights! In coming to the decision, a few cases were taken into account, one case involving a man caught along a highway with possession of counterfeit Nike shoes and another involving a man selling hats with the state logo printed on it. The case was first brought to Center County Court presided by Judge Thomas King Kistler. The then judge thought the law was too vague, and agreed by another judge Justice Max Baer at the Supreme Court later on. However, local and federal laws still can be applied in some cases. Looks like early days before we can see more deliberations from othe states!
October 13, 2009.
A Trademark clearing house
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it will help create a database of internet trademarks with the aim of bolstering trademark protection. The trademark clearing house will help firms to launch trademark infringement claims, and have them dealt with swiftly. It however did not agree to a proposal to allow firms to pre-register to apply for new generic top-level domains which will soon be expanded. ICANN has also temporarily suspended the discussion on the approval of the xxx adult site domain.
March 18, 2010.
