How To Search Availability Of A Trademark?

As described earlier, a trademark is one of the most important elements for a brand to protect its intellectual property. Having a registered trademark can give you numerous advantage in terms of exclusive and legal rights to the trademark.

For a business entity to register with a particular trademark, the first step is to check if the brand mark you want to register for your brand is available or not. It is possible that that particular design or logo be already registered with some other entity, which would result in legal complications.

The question that arises, now, is how to search for availability and what would the process entail. We are going to guide you step by step for the complete search process.

The Trademark Act of 1999 provides for the registration of trademarks. The Registrar of Trademarks has opened access to everyone to their trademark database. This database has to be searched and on the basis of the result provided by it, you can get the desired trademark registered for your company.

Note: apart from the result of the database search, there are other conditions of the registrar office that factor in while making a decision about giving you a certificate for the trademark or not.

There are various ways of searching the database for the trademark availability. The most easy and less complicated method of searching availability is being discussed here for your benefit –

• Visit this link – https://ipindiaonline.gov.in/tmrpublicsearch/frmmain.aspx to access the database search Once you click on this link, you will be directed to the registrar’s database page for your search –
• You will have to fill in the three main blanks for ‘search type’, ‘word mark’ and ‘class’ on this
• Change the default option from ‘start with’ to ‘contains’.
• Click on the button that says ‘search’ on the end of the page, and await the results.
• Once the result appears, you will notice that a lot of applications have To make the process easier, press Ctrl+f to open the ‘find’ bar.
• Once the find bar opens, type in the name one letter at a time.
• When, the name has been typed in the search for applications with which it matches will begin.
• The entries that match the exact name will start The key to ensure that the search is completely reliable is to type one letter at a time and search for it. This way, the matching entries will keep on lessening as you type in the letters.
• Once you have searched by typing in the last letter and if the results show 0 applications, you can be assured that there are no applications with the same trademark, and then you can begin the registration
• In the event that the name matches with an application already present in the database, you will have to modify or change it.

Thus, you can search the availability and decide non the final trademark for your company. Make sure you have conducted thus search before you file for registration.