The Benefits of Registering your Trademark

In Canada and certain other countries (e.g., the U.S.), you can acquire rights to a trademark just by using it in association with your product or service. However, such rights are limited to the scope of geographic area you can prove that the trademark has been made known to identify your business of company as the source of the product or service. Further, merely obtaining a corporate name or registering a business name that is different from your corporate name, does not give you exclusive “trademark” rights to your name. To learn more about the differences, please read our other article: Simply Incorporating or Registering a business name does NOT give you exclusive rights to the name.

On the other hand, some of the benefits of registering your trademark include:

1. Obtaining exclusive rights to use the trademark across Canada, even in provinces or cities in which you have never used the trademark.
2. Increasing the value of your business as part of your intellectual property portfolio to show to prospective licensees, franchisees, buyers and investors.
3. Becoming eligible to enroll in Amazon’s Brand Registry program that helps protect your registered trademarks online.
4. Becoming eligible to submit a request to the Canada Border Services Agency to monitor for and temporarily detain suspected counterfeit products that use your registered trademark at the border.
5. Making it easier to successfully sue or prevent others from using an identical or confusingly similar trademark from an evidential standpoint.

Our firm has registered Trademark Agents and experienced lawyers who can promptly assist you with the preparation and filing of your trademark application, and prevent you from making mistakes that may not be correctable after your application has already been filed.

Please contact us by email at trademarks@kmblaw.com to begin the process of registering your trademark or to schedule a free 20-minute general consultation.