TABLE OF CONTENTS The aim of a trade mark is to encourage purchasers to buy your company's product or your company's service by using the mark when they place an order. It follows that trade marks should be easy to remember and sufficiently different from marks used by competitors to avoid confusion.
Trade marks are most important for consumer goods or services supplied to the public, but they can also be used for high-technology products or in heavy engineering. This chapter describes briefly the principles and, it is hoped, the benefits of good trade marks for engineering businesses.
In the UK, trade marks need not be registered, but there are many advantages in having a registration, so this chapter considers first the requirements of registrability. The principles are sensible ones, so they should be used when selecting a trade mark even if there is no plan to register it.
A trade mark can be any sign capable of being represented graphically . Most marks are words or two-dimensional symbols, or a combination of the two, but it is possible to have marks which are three dimensional, or consist of a sound or a smell.
There are two basic requirements. The first is that the mark must be distinctive, that is, it must be capable of indicating goods or services originating from a particular source and of distinguishing those products from the products of competitors. The second requirement is that the mark does not indicate the...
