Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

Not too long ago, advertisements on the radio, print media and television were the best means to spread the word about any goods or services that were to be marketed. Times have changed and it takes more than just a few ads and discounts to retain consumers and maintain a steady market share. Marketing, publicising and brand building have reached new heights in the last few years, thanks to the internet. Keeping pace with changing times and making a prominent place in the cyber space seems to…

So you’ve filed and registered your trademark, and have been using it consistently. Life goes on as merrily as possible until you realize that there are counterfeit products with your trademark in the market. The first thing you would have to do is conduct an investigation into where the products are coming from. The counterfeit products could be manufactured within India or it could be manufactured outside the country and shipped in.

We have been providing regular updates on the efforts taken by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (CGPDTM) to achieve complete automation and more significant, absolute transparency(some of our articles on this could be found here and here). In yet another move towards transparency, the CGPDTM has now introduced "Stock and Flow based Dynamic Trademark Utility."

So what if the awe-inspiring Google GLASS had everyone spell bound; the spell and the GLASS appear to be unceremoniously shattered(pun intended!) by the United States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO).

We bring you a guest post by Ratnavel Pandian, a third year student of National University of Juridical Sciences. In this post, he takes us through why the US faces pressure from its lawmakers to take India to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regarding India's patent regime and the unfairness of the whole scenario.

I write this post with Indian audience in mind. When reading about or discussing IP laws or rights, we tend to think only of patents, copyrights, trademarks and maybe designs. There are however other intellectual property (IP) laws in India.

For those of you who decided to read the article based on the title, expecting some hard hitting piece of English prose on India and US talks on IP based on the issue of pharma patents and the like; I’m sorry to disappoint. I started off this post with a very simple question in mind as to whether the political parties contesting the elections in India have their names, symbols or slogans trademarked or not.

Tech start-ups seem to be the flavour of the day in most entrepreneur meets but amidst the wide array of software companies there is an oft neglected team of people who work exclusively on building hardware. The silent workers who have it more difficult in terms of securing funding, gaining visibility and pretty much anything.

When a trademark application is filed, it is examined by the Trademark Office to check if it overcomes the objections laid down by the Trademarks Act 1999(predominantly Section 9 and Section 11 of the Act). If there are objections to registration of the said mark, an opportunity is given to the applicant to overcome the objections so raised through a response to the examination report and further, if necessary, through a hearing before a Hearing officer. Based on the same, the mark is either…

From the newspapers to our daily lives and our secret fears – it’s all about being intimidated by the big guy. Most of us believe (or is it just me?) that they can be overpowering because they are they and we are we. I can’t begin to fathom how it must be out there for the new entrepreneurs in the competitive market. The big sharks are waiting to swallow them and they tread carefully hoping to survive the competition. The David-Goliath battle in not new to any filed and it is no exception in…