By Rachna Budhiraja, Associate & Garima Rai, Sr. Associate
The Controller General Patents, Designs and Trademarks issued a public notice dated 28 July, 2016 regarding the process relating to generation & issuance of registration certificates for applications made for registration of trademarks in India. According to the said notice, from 1st August, 2016, the registration certificates will be generated through an automated system in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Trade Marks Act & Rules and made available to the applicants concerned or their authorised agents on record, in respect of all trademark applications.
The automated registration certificates will be issued for the trade mark applications-
- which have been published in the Trade Marks Journal Number 1720 dated 23.11.2015 and thereafter,
- where no request for amendment filed on behalf of the applicant is pending for disposal,
- where the copy of original application for registration is available in the Trade Marks Registry’s electronic database,
- where no requirement (like fee, Power of Attorney, etc.) is pending for compliance on part of the applicant, and
- which have not been specifically prohibited for registration by the order of any court, IPAB or any competent authority
The Indian Trademark Registry further clarifies that the trademark cases which are left out by the automated registration process due to aforesaid reasons will be processed as per law by the Registration wing of the Examination Publication and Registration Section of the TMR Mumbai through the present Trade Marks System on case to case basis.
In all the other cases the automatically generated trademark certificate will be transmitted to the applicant or his authorised agent vide the email address recorded with the trademark office. To this end, the applicants or authorised agents are required to submit their valid email-id to the TMR office for facilitating quick transmission of the trademark certificates.
The Registration certificates generated by the automated procedure will be transmitted to the concerned applicant or his authorised agent on record on his email address recorded with this office and shall also be made available on the official website (http://www.ipindia.nic.in) along with status of the application concerned. The Registration certificate made available on the website may be downloaded and printed as desired by the applicant.
The automation of the generation of the trademark registration certificates is a praiseworthy initiative as it helps in reducing the time taken for the transmission of the registration certificate to the applicant. Further, the applicant should also comply with all the requirements for obtaining trade mark registration as per the Trade Marks Act & Rules. This reduces the overall time taken for the registration of a trademark.