Govt to overhaul trademark law

NEW DELHI: Trademark legislation is set for major amendments. As part of the ongoing efforts to make the domestic IPR legal system consistent with the TRIPS obligations, the government proposes to repeal the existing Trade and Merchandise Marks Act 1958 and instead, bring in a new Act soon.
The proposed legislation, currently in draft form with the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP), would increase the term of trademark registration from the present 7 years to 10 years, bring in the concepts of ‘service marks’ and ‘collective marks’ to the Indian system and would also create a new genre called ‘well-known marks.’ The marks qualified as well-known marks under specified criteria would receive higher levels of protection as they are more vulnerable to presumptive imitations, officials said. The proposed changes would be in tune with the rise in economic value of trademarks as corporate assets. The aim is to internationalise and modernise the domestic laws, they added.
Contesting the validity of a registered mark would be more difficult. Contesting would be permissible subject to the existence of freshly defined circumstances. Corporates that wish to have collective marks —representing more than one class of goods or services or both — would be allowed to register such marks.
The final authority for disposing of registration applications would vest with the registrar. The draft of the new Act has been attuned to copyright law, to avoid inconsistencies, officials added. Establishment of an Appellate Board on trademarks has been proposed.
Along with the proposed change in law, projects are underway to upgrade administrative infrastructure and to simplify registration procedures. The backlog of unexamined applications of about 5 lakh cases at various stages in the trademark registry has already been brought down to zero. As part of the upgradation of IPR infrastructure, online registration of applications in regional offices and headquarters in Mumbai had begun from October ‘02. Renewal of trademark certificates is instantaneous and new applications are being examined within a week from filing, sources said.
A digital database library on CD-ROMS of 1,50,000 trademark certificates and trademark journals has been created.