Trademark Registry:

Trademark registry was established in the year 1940 in India and it administers by the trademarks act, 1999 and the rules made there under. It acts as information and a resource center and it is a facilitator regarding to trademarks in a country.

Objectives of trademark registry:

The objectives of trade marks act is to register the mark which is applied in a country and to provide the legal protection of business marks for both goods and services and mainly it is used to prevent the fraudulent use of the mark.

As per the provision of the trademarks act and rules the trademark registry will taken into consideration for registering the mark which should be a qualified one. This is the most important step of registry.

Madrid protocol:

It is the one which is specifically used for international registration of trademarks. Trademark registry act as an office of origin with respect of applications which is made by the Indian entrepreneurs for international registration of the mark and also it is an office for the designated contracting party with regards to international registration which clearly indicates India has been designated to protect the relevant marks.

The trademark registry head office is located at Mumbai and the branch offices are at Chennai, Ahmedabad, Delhi, and Kolkata. The functions which are related to international registration under the Madrid protocol, international registration wing has been set up in the trademark registry head office at Mumbai.

The registry holds some other responsibilities, it need to discharge functions like offering preliminary advice as to register and it enables search to be made under section 45(1) of the copyright act, 1957 to the effect that there should not be any trademark similarity or deceptively similar to some artistic works which are sought to be registered as a copyright, has been registered as a trademark.

Providing necessary, relevant information and the guidelines to the public about the trademarks. The updated rules and regulations are mentioned in their site in order to aware the public. The information will be provided to the government agencies including central excise personnel, police, public grievance redressal, generating annual statistical report, maintaining the top class IP library, production of official trademarks journal in the form of electronic and submit an annual report to parliament.

The controller general who is in patent, design and trademark heads to the registry offices and do the function as same like trademark registrar. He may assign the functions of the trademark registrar to other officers who are appointed by the central government .Those officers can function as like the registrar in respect to the roles assigned to them.

Trademark Registry and its functions:

Currently, the functions of the trademark registry are performed by an automated trademark system. The centralised server of trademark registry is at intellectual property office (IPO) building which is in Delhi and Disaster Recovery Centre (DRC) is at Mumbai IPO. The main server in Delhi has the connection of all the branches of the trademark registry with the Virtual Private Network (VPN). All the functions and the actions which are done by the office staffs will be recorded in the central server.

What are the steps involved at administration for registering a trademark?

The very initial step is to submit the application for registration of trademarks which has to be received either at the head or branch office of the trademark registry. The registry should be in the territorial place where the business place of the applicant is located. The formality checking and digitisation of the application is done at the respective offices.

After that the application will be scrutinised in order to identify whether it is a distinguishing mark of goods or services, whether the application is prohibited for registration, or if the registration of the particular marks is likely to induce any similarity or deception of the existing mark. Even if the application been submitted at the branch registry, the examination of the applications is carried out in the centralised head office of the trademarks which is situated at Mumbai.

The evidence of use or uniqueness defines and decides whether to do the further registration or not when the application is under consideration by the registrar.

Once the application got accepted at the registry, they will publish the same on the trademark journal, an official gazette. The information used to host on official website for every week.

Within the period of four months from the date of publication, any person can file an opposition on the trademark. In this kind of cases, the opposition proceedings will be conducted at the respective offices of the trademark registry.

In the process of opposition, the copy of the opposition notice will be served to the applicant. He is the one who should file a counter statement within the period of two months.

If he fails to file a counter statement, then the application got abandoned. The copy of the counter statement will be sent to the defendant as evidence by the way of affidavit. In the same way the opponent also files evidence by way of rebuttal. On completing the evidence procedures, the matters will bring on to the hearing officers who are the deciding authority of this issue.

The decision of the registrar’s is appealable to the Intellectual property appellate board.