I’ve been asked the question about monopoly by one of my clients recently. If you are reading my blog for a while now, you probably think that the answer is simple. However it emerges that there exist a lot of disagreements in that matter. What is more, I often have to explain the scope of legal protection even to people, who have registered their company names years ago.
What is the problem?
A lot of people are convinced, that after registering a name of their company, product or service in the Patent Office – they have an absolute exclusivity for it. Who knows, maybe its people’s conviction about inventions what affects this state of affairs. Becouse if somebody happened to obtain a patent protection for his invention, nobody else is allowed to create anything similair.
Those are only my suppositions, but it seems to be reasonable.
Especially due to the fact that I often receive questions like “is there a possibility to obtain a patent for a company name?”. Trade marks are protected with protection rights, not with patents.
I’ll try to dispel all doubts by writing a few words about it.
What do you have a monopoly for?
It is true, that by registering a name in the Patent Office, you obtain an exclusivity for it.
There are although some restrictions.
When registering your trademark, you have to specify goods and services, for which the protection should apply. In other words, you have to indicate a sector, in which you operate.
If you produce agricultural machines, you are probably not interested in protection for dairy products, and vice-versa.
A lot of people are forgetting about it, while the matter itself is easier than you think.
A person who wants to buy a tractor for semi-trailer, will never buy a bottle of milk by a mistake 😉
Even if the of both undertakings would be phonetically identical. There is therfore not a slight risk, that a potential consumer would be confused.
What don’t you have a monopoly for?
I’ve partly answered this question in the above paragraph.
You don’t have a monopoly for a given word in every possible sector. I have faced such allegation before.
The entrepreneur was saddened, becouse he was ranked third in Google results. In front of him there were two undertakings named the same. He didn’t care, that those companies were operating in completely different sectors.
He demanded a severe law enforcement, which, as you now see, is impossible.
A false conviction about that matter is sometimes being reprodued by media.
Here you can read an article about the polish company Amber Gold, which happened to trigger a huge financial scandal in Poland.
The author of it suggests, that the owner of the same-named IT company from Koszalin could have protected himself, by registering the name in the Patent Office. It is of course not true.
The protection for a trademark wouldn’t help in this situation.
- Small company and trademark. When to file a trademark application? - 20 March 2018
- Trademark similarity: When does it lead to an infringement of the law? - 15 February 2018
- Rebranding – when it is a threat to your company? How not to lose a trademark? - 8 January 2018