Trademark Applications
Trademark, basically, is a phrase, word or symbol owned by a person or a company to represent the goods or services that are offered by him. Though There are many kinds of trademark such as word mark, collective mark, sound mark, they all are used for the same purpose i.e., to help consumers to identify the goods and services of a particular person or organization.
Mainly there are eight types of trademarks-
- Word trademark – Word marks are words, letters or numbers which represent particular type of goods or services offered by the organization. These marks only include letters and numbers and does not contain any shape or design or colour. Examples of wordmark are Pepsi, KFC, Microsoft etc.
- Colour Mark – these basically include colours or combination of colours that are used to represent certain goods or services offered by an organization. Organizations register colour marks when a certain type of colour gets associated with their goods or services. For eg Cadbury chocolates usually comes in a purple-coloured packaging.
- Device mark – These marks are the most commonly used marks. These marks include a logo or figure along with a word.
- Three Dimension marks – The three-dimensional marks are marks which contain logos and figures in 3-D look.
- Shape of goods mark – Shape of goods mark are used in cases where the goods offered by the organization has a distinctive shape. these marks are used to protect these distinctive shapes of a product. An example of shape mark is the bottle of the Coca-Cola.
- Sound mark – Sound marks are sounds which are used to represent certain types of goods and services. These are usually used in commercials. Example of a sound mark is tune of IPL.
- Collective marks – Collective marks are marks which are applied by an organization or association and is utilised by the members of that organization/ association for e.g., institute of Chartered Accountant of India (ICAI) and the members i.e., the Chartered Accountants of the ICAI would be able to use the logos as they are members and they would not have to apply for a separate trademark, they can use the one collectively acquired and registered as a collective Trademark.
- Certification mark – are marks which means whoever will be able to fulfil condition of the certification marks, only they would be able to use those marks. You might have seen the ISI marks on various products. Only people authorised to have that certification would be able to do so after fulfilling all the conditions laid down by ISI.