What Are the Advantages?

There are a few reasons why you want to do it. Because the trademark registration process, as you will know, is long. It takes several months, 18 months in Canada, 14 months in the US, 12 months in Europe. 

It takes about eight months in Canada, four months in the US, and about four months in Europe for you to even hear back from the Trademarks Office the first time around—when somebody else files a trademark that may be similar to yours, they won't even know necessarily if it's similar to yours, especially if they didn't do the proper trademark search. 

What you want to do is to notify them right away that you see what they're doing and that you don't approve of it.

Saving Yourself Time

The benefit of that is that even if the Trademarks Office is going to stop them, is going to write back to them and say, "Well, we think your trademark is too close to somebody else's," a lot of time will have passed and they will have invested a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy in building what they think is their brand. 

It's a lot easier to make them stop early if you say, "Excuse me, excuse me, this trademark that you're trying to file is actually too close to ours. We filed it before you did and we're going to do everything to make sure the Trademarks Office doesn't allow yours. 

I would suggest that you abandon this trademark right away before you invest more time, money, and energy building that up." It works in many cases, just as you would expect.

An Easier Trademarking Process

If it doesn't, then you can again continue monitoring what happens with that other trademark and see if the Trademarks Office approves it. If they do approve it, then it will go to publication, which will allow you to oppose it. 

This is especially important in Europe, where the Trademarks Office is not going to examine somebody else's trademark based on its being confusingly similar to somebody else's trademarks, meaning yours. It's the responsibility of a trademark owner to oppose any trademarks that they think are confusingly similar to theirs. 

How are you going to know about those other new trademarks if you don't really have somebody constantly watching their database to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks?

Andrei: Sum it Up!

Again, we offer a service called Weekly Confusion Watch Service. We can do it before your trademark registers, after your trademark registers. We can even do it without actually working on your trademark if you need to. 

Just tell us what the brand is and we will make sure that whenever somebody files a trademark similar to yours, you're going to get notified and you'll decide whether you want to send a nasty letter, whether you want to wait to see what the Trademarks Office does with that, whether you want to oppose it when the times comes, whether you want to sue them in the court system. That decision you can make based on the information that we're going to provide to you.