TRADE MARKS

Properly registered trademarks are important to protect your unique brand, and to make sure your competitors don’t get a free ride on the back of your hard work marketing your business.

You can trademark words, logos, shapes, colours, scents, images or packaging – all of those things that uniquely identify your business and products.

Contact Golja Haines & Friend to talk about the best way to protect your business through using trademarks.

Golja Haines & Friend can assist you with:

• Searching to see if your chosen trademark is already taken by someone else, or providing an opinion on whether the trade mark is likely to be allowed by the Australian Trade Marks Office – a part of IP Australia
• Filing an application to register a trade mark with the Australian Trade Marks Office and in Trademark Offices around the world, including filing an International Trade Mark Application under the Madrid Protocol, or by use of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property
• Prosecuting your trademark application through to grant, which includes advising on responses to Office Actions by Trademark Examiners (also called examiner’s reports) and filing the response in the best way to overcome the objection raised by the examiner
• Running an opposition against the grant of a trademark registration or defending an opposition filed by someone else against the registration of your application
• Providing infringement or freedom to operate advice.  This may be to a trademark holder wishing to enforce the trademark registration rights against an infringer or it may be to a business wishing to avoid infringing the rights of a trademark registration owner
• Attending to annuities (payment of renewal fees) along with monitoring of annuity dates

Does registering my business name mean I have a registered Trade Mark?

Registering a business name is not the same as registering a Trade Mark. 

A “Business Name”, must be registered with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in order to legally trade in Australia. A key purpose of which is to enable the public to identify the person(s) behind the Business Name.

The registration of a Business Name provides no rights to prevent other traders using a similar name.

That is why it is important to also register your Trade Mark to protect your business.