Registering a trademark grants its owner rights for the exclusive use of that mark in commerce. However, the burden of uncovering infringement falls onto the owner; the trademark itself then serves as a legal basis for enforcing ownership rights.
Therefore, trademark holders should consider some form of trademark watching - a practice of monitoring the market for instances of brand violation. This can be done in two ways - manually or by signing up for a trademark watch service.
While trademark watch services are an additional investment, we believe they offer advantages that manual monitoring just can't match, namely:
- Not wasting time on irrelevant results: Trademark watching needs to be performed regularly. If you want to monitor trademark registers for new applications that could pose infringement to your trademark, you need to monitor them at least once a month so you'd have enough time to oppose the new mark within its opposition window. Instead of going through search results on the IPO's website, with a trademark watch service, you get a pre-filtered list of results via email. Some months, there might not even be any relevant result, so you won't have to invest an unnecessary amount of time into monitoring.
- Not wasting time on multiple searches: You don't have to search multiple IP registers each time. This is useful if you own a trademark in numerous countries, but not only then. For example, if you own a German trademark, you'll probably want to monitor both Germany's IP office (DPMA) and the EU's IP office (EUIPO) since both German and EU marks can infringe upon yours.
