The legal myth that we are busting today is that your trademark gives you protection everywhere. Now I always say, your registered trademark is your superpower. It’s stronger than a company name, a domain name, and a business name. Every business should have one, but there is a limitation with trademarks. It only goes as far as the geographical limitation, so if you’ve registered in Australia, you get your protection in Australia, if you’ve registered in the U.S.A., you get protection in the U.S.A., If you’ve registered in England, you get protection in England, if you’ve registered in Sweden, you get protection in Sweden.
You get the picture, there are some territories that kind of amalgamate so you can do, like, a super-registration. For example, the European Union covers you in all of the European Union countries. So, if you come to somebody like me to do your trademark registration for you, I wouldn’t be able to seek protection worldwide. There’s no such thing as a worldwide trademark registration. So you have to select the countries or the territories that you want your trademark to be protected in.
The costs vary from country to country because the government fees vary. So every country that you select charges a government fee, in Australia at the moment the government fee is $330. In other countries, it might be significantly more or significantly less, and it changes with time. So if you want a trademark in the European Union, for example, the government fees will be thousands of dollars, because each country takes their cut. So trademark registration doesn’t give you worldwide domination, not automatically anyway.
You have to select the countries you want and pay, pay to dominate with that trademark. Worldwide trademarks can sometimes be tricky, because now, you have to make sure that a similar trademark doesn’t already pre-exist on the trademarks register in all of those other countries. Anyway, it has been fun busting legal myths with you to protect your business and give you the lifestyle that you deserve. My name is Cathryn Warburton. I am The Legal Lioness and if you want to hear more about legal myths being busted, hop onto legallioness.com.
