TRADEMARKS
The message transmitted to ensure that the company is known in the market must be protected as effectively as possible.
Consumers are attracted by trademarks which they perceive as being trustworthy and synonyms of quality. For this reason it is necessary to protect commercial names which allow products / services to be recognised in the market.
The Spanish Trademark Office is the organisation responsible for protecting the identity of a company, since, contrary to what is generally considered to be true, the Companies Registry is not the institution that channels those rights. Filing a trademark or logotype that identifies a company gives owners an exclusive right of use in identifying the activity of their company.
This activity is classified in the INTERNATIONAL NOMENCLATURE which has 45 classes. The first 34 of these classes protect products and the other classes protect services.
- Reports on precedents of national, community and international trademarks
- Advice on optimum registration
- Registration formalities for national, community and international trademarks
- Statements of oppositions to third parties and responses to suspensions
- Appeals against granted and rejected applications
- Vigilance of own and competing trademarks
- Maintenance, monitoring and expiry warnings
- Trademark portfolio audits
- Drafting of trademark usage licence agreements
- Citations based on priority rights
- Civil and criminal lawsuits following the infringement of rights
PATENTS
If you have developed a new product or a new process, you should consider the option of patenting and include it as part of your business strategy. One of the key issues in this regard is the manner in which a company protects the results of its innovations, i.e., how it prevents other companies from taking unfair advantage of the efforts made by the innovating company. Companies normally have different alternatives for protecting their investments in innovation. One consists of keeping the results secret, thus giving rise to what is known as a “trade secret”. The difference between deciding on one system or the other lies in the fact that patents always offer greater safety: any person using the invention without authorisation can be sued, whether or not that person knows of the existence of the patent. On the contrary, the trade secret option offers weaker protection which is limited to the right to request economic compensation from the person obliged to respect that secret (basically, employees) who discloses it or uses it for their own benefit or for the benefit of another. In other words, the trade secret option only provides protection against espionage.
Patent management services:
- Information on patents, utility models, industrial models and drawings Publisher in the Official Industrial Property Gazette
- Information about publications of European and International patent applications (PCT)
- Advice and study of the best form of protection
- Access to Patent Model Databases
- Studies on the infringement of rights, evaluation of patents
- Drafting of patents and utility models
- Patentability reports
- Drafting of patent usage licence agreements
- Civil and criminal lawsuits arising from infringement of rights
- Advice with respect to unfair competition
- Monitoring of incidents and expiry dates