2. Missing Trade Mark Rights in an important new market – nobody can get it 100% right

Protecting trade marks is important. But for global businesses, it’s a global task (or near-global – the whole EU, for example, can be protected by one registration) with pretty sizeable costs. Even huge multinationals restrict initial protection costs to markets where there’s reasonable confidence of the success of a new product. Over a period – perhaps even a year or two – other markets will start to look promising and so a new round of brand protection is needed. By then, third party rights may be in the way. In the Apple case here, third party rights did get in the way. Apple did nothing wrong – in a practical world, they just could not protect the globe at the outset. If you’re a business which exports, you’re quite likely to encounter the same problem at some point; it’s life.

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