Trademark and design clearance and risk assessment

Kate Swaine from Gowling WLG (UK) published a quite interesting article which concerns how a company should carry out a brand and design clearance that in turn could prevent future collisions with third party’s intellectual property rights.

When we talk about clearance in that case we mean more or less the following:

• Searching in the official Patent Offices’ databases for earlier registered trademarks and industrial designs. This should be done at the stage of brand and design building which will help any problems to be avoided in time before more time and money to be invested;
• Searching for identical or similar internet domain names that can secure the use of the relevant mark on the internet;
• Searching whether the trademark name resembles any company name that can create possible legal collisions;
• Searching in Google for earlier similar unregistered trademarks of designs;
• Making a risk assessment based on the information from the different searches above. This will give a clear picture about whether the relevant marks and designs can be used without legal hurdles or whether such use can lead to costly lawsuits.

For more information here.

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