WHY IT IS CRUCIAL FOR BUSINESS OWNERS TO MONITOR TRADEMARKS

This year, the Czech trademark law was amended. Now, it is up to each trademark owner to regularly monitor whether someone’s trademark application infringes their rights and, if so, to oppose the registration of such a trademark application.

Before the change, the IPO itself refused to register trademarks that were identical to an already registered trademark for the same products and services, and the trademark owner could thus rely on the IPO not to register a competing trademark. The obligation to monitor trademark applications has now been transferred to trademark owners.

If the trademark owner does not follow the published trademark applications, he may be unpleasantly surprised to find that someone else has registered an identical or very similar trademark. This situation can be solved, but for the owner, it means considerable complications and the need to spend time and money to solve it.

This situation can easily be prevented by regular monitoring of trademarks and possible filing of objections to trademark registration.

The fee for filing objections against a Czech trademark is 1,000 CZK and against a European Union trademark, it is 320 EUR. If the opposition is not filed within three months from the publication of the trademark application, the IPO will register the mark as a new trademark despite its identity.

Therefore, we offer our clients monitoring of national, European Union, and international trademark applications in trademark databases. This service consists of regularly checking newly published trademark applications, sending reports to clients about the monitoring, and in the event of discovering trademarks that could be similar or interchangeable with their trademarks, we can immediately file an objection to their registration. Many of our clients already use this service and, in many cases, we discovered an application for a filed trademark, against which it was necessary to file an objection.

The price of monitoring one trademark is 3,500 CZK (without VAT) per year, when monitoring 2 or more trademarks we provide a discount of 10% of the total amount.

If you are interested in the trademark monitoring service, please do not hesitate to contact us.