Industries ministry has taken a move to amend the existing trademarks act to prevent registration of deceptive and confusingly similar trademarks by business enterprises, officials said. They said that many business organisations were engaged in conflict among themselves over using similar or confusingly similar trademarks of their products. Some business organisations, taking the ambiguity of the existing Trademarks Act-2009, had been trying to receive trademarks registration for their products which are almost similar in marks, name, symbol, package and description of products to existing trademarks for other products, they said.
The existing act also bars registration of identical or deceptively similar trademark for a product or service which is already registered for the same kinds of product or service in the name of a different proprietors, officials said.
But there are some ambiguities in the language of the act and business organisations try to take advantage of such ambiguities, they said.
A high official of the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks of the ministry recently told New Age that many business enterprises remained engaged in legal battle over trademarks issues and the number of disputes has been increasing day by day.
Legal battles over trademarks for Energy Plus, Lexus biscuit, testy saline between some local companies are the unique example of commercial disputes, he said.
He, however, said that more than 60 per cent of disputes that came to DPDT are between local and foreign companies as local companies are not conscious about trademarks and use same trademark of a reputed local or international trademark for their products.
DPDT is facing problems in solving the disputes as the definition of deceptively similar mark is confusing, he said.
According to statistics of the DPDT, currently there are 287 cases that remained pending with the department on opposition of trademark registration while another 188 remained on trial at the High Court.
In this context, DPDT has prepared a draft of the amendment of the act clarifying the issues.
DPDT has already sought opinion from the stakeholders and the amendment will be finalised incorporating the feedback, he said.
According to Article 10 (5) of the draft, DPDT will not register any trademark or description of a mark for any
product or service which is similar or confusingly and deceptively similar to a well-know trademark in the country.
The dispute related to opposition of trademark registration will be solved within 360 working days which was 120 working days in the original act, the draft stated.
The proposal of extending timeframe is made as the procedures described in the act take longer time, official said.
-With New Age input
