http://trademark-1.com/Government agency in charged of keeping a public record of registered trademarks and patents in Bolivia is SERVICIO NACIONAL DE PROPIEDAD INTELECTUAL (SENAPI); being the same institution that also handles copyright matters. Denominative, figurative or combined Trademarks for goods and services can be registered in Bolivia. Goods and services to be protected in a trademark application should be classified in accordance with the International Classification of goods of Nice.
Rules on trademarks, patents and copyright are provided by Ruling law on Trademarks dated January 15, 1918; as well as Supreme Decree No. 20791 dated May 10, 1985 and supplementary articles nos. 138-151 of decision 486 from Cartagena Agreement, enacted to protect industrial property rights of corporations and individuals in this jurisdiction. Bolivia is a member of Paris Convention. Foreign applicants should appoint a local attorney with a legal domicile in Bolivia to deal with applications and office actions that may be issued by SENAPI regarding application.
Trademark Certificate is granted for a 10 year term; renewable for same period.
For information on costs and professional fees for registering a trademark, commercial name or patent in BOLIVIA. Contact us now!
Related Services
1.- Availability search of trademarks and study of feasibility of registration.
2.- Filing of Trademark, Commercial names, patent, industrial design applications.
3.- Renewals and Patent annuity payments, updating owner-related information, amendments; license registration.
4.-Administrative process against or in defense of trademarks and patent applications such as oppositions, nullity or cancellation actions lodged by third parties.
5.- Legal actions against trademark infringement
6.- Litigation process for infraction of Intellectual Property rights; anti-counterfeiting, copyright law litigation.
Trademarks are words, names, symbols, designs, phrases, sounds, scents, or color schemes that identify the products and services of a business or organization and which distinguish them from the products and services of others. Businesses need to be very careful in selecting a trademark name for a new product, service or business, because it is expensive to produce and market a new product, and because it can take years to develop the good will associated with the product and the product name.
The federal trademark law, the Lanham Act of 1946 (15 USC § 1051 et seq.), gives federal protection to trademarks--the marks on tangible goods; service marks--the marks on services such as restaurants, financial institutions, and hair salons; certification marks--which certify that products or services have certain characteristics or qualities (such as the UL symbol, which certifies that the goods conform to the safety standards of the Underwriters Laboratories); and collective marks--which indicate membership in a cooperative, association, or organization (such as the PGA symbol used in pro shops and at tournaments by members of the Professional Golfers' Association). In the Lanham Act and in this article, trademarks, service marks, certification marks, collective marks, and trade names that are used as trademarks are all referred to generally as trademarks, or simply as marks.
An important part of trademark selection is a search to determine if the desired trademark is available. A quick search of the Internet's World Wide Web can serve as a preliminary or "knock-out" search to reveal immediate conflicts. A similar preliminary search can be conducted in a trademark registration database. If no conflicts appear, it is then necessary to searc h for prior usage of the desired trademark in a variety of resources, which include trademark registrations, sources of unregistered trademarks, and litigation information. This is necessary due to the fact that trademarks are established in the U.S. through 1) registration[1] with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the PTO) or with the secretary of state offices in the fifty states and 2) through common law use.
A comprehensive trademark availability search should include searches of
Most of the resources for the trademark availability search are available on the Internet. Some may be accessed without charge, but many are available for a fee. The resources can be searched in-house, or by one of the many outside search firms that specialize in trademark searching. This article discusses 1) resources and techniques for conducting a comprehensive trademark availability search; 2) additional uses of trademark research resources; and 3) resources for searching trademarks outside the U.S. The article concludes with Database Resource Information.
THE COMPREHENSIVE TRADEMARK AVAILABILITY SEARCH
The trademark availability search should begin by determining whether the desired mark consists of, or is imitative of, a "famous" trademark, in violation of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act.[2] Once relation to a famous trademark is ruled out, the primary test of a mark's availability is whether it is confusingly similar in appearance, sound, or meaning to another existing mark for a similar or related product or service. Legally, the trademark selected cannot be so similar to the already-existing trademark of a related product that it would cause confusion in the minds of the products' purchasers as to the source of the product. To determine whether confusingly similar marks exist, the searcher must check for exact matches and for variant spellings and phonetic equivalents (e.g. QUICK, QUIK, KWIC, KWIK, KWYK, etc.). It is also necessary to check for homonyms, synonyms, and marks with the same prefix, suffix, or mid-word character string, as well as for word mark/design equivalents (e.g. the word mark Pegasus was held to infringe Mobil Oil Company's design mark of the mythical flying horse[3]).
Bolivia Trademarks There are many words, prefixes, or suffixes that are used so frequently that they appear in hundreds of marks. For instance, a March, 1997 search of the Trademarkscan-Federal database revealed 40,905 marks which include the letter string "pro" (e.g. PROTEIN PLUS, COMPRO, and NELPROF). As a result, it is often necessary to narrow the search to include only marks for related goods or services. This is done by narrowing the results of the initial search by class of goods or services and/or by description of goods or services. An alphabetical index, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual, is available to help identify the appropriate class or classes in the International Classification system of 42 broad classes. Searching by class requires caution due to inconsistencies in the classification system (e.g. blankets are in International Class 24 and pillows are in International Class 20). When narrowing the search by class, it's best to include even slightly-related classes to avoid missing relevant marks. Limiting the search by the descriptions of goods/services is more difficult because the descriptions are those provided by the applicant in the trademark application, and they vary considerably (e.g. one applicant may describe the product as "shoes", another as "footwear"). The searcher must use synonyms and truncated terms to avoid missing marks in a goods/services search.
It should be noted that it takes several weeks for new application information to appear in the federal registration databases, and longer in the state registration databases. Sometimes it takes years for the marks of small businesses to appear in common law resources. This means that conflicting marks may not have been added to a database at the time of the search. To further complicate trademark availability searching, foreign applicants for federal registration (under the Lanham Act's Section 44) may obtain priority based on the foreign filing date, which can be as much as six months earlier than the U.S. registration filing date. When conducting comprehensive trademark searches, the searcher must search as comprehensively as possible but with the knowledge that there is some risk that there is a conflicting mark somewhere.
The federal registration databases obtain their information from the PTO's database of pending and active registrations. Most registration databases also include records for marks which have been canceled or abandoned, or have expired. The registration databases all provide essentially the same information for each mark: status; class of goods/services; description of goods/services; filing and registration dates; serial and registration numbers; Section 8 and 15 filing information; current and previous owners; and TTAB proceedings involving the trademark. However, there are differences in data currentness and in the detail and search options provided by the various database producers. For instance, owner searching or searching by design are not available on all databases.
The databases also differ depending on the type of search method they provide. There are two search method types, scan and phonetic. Most databases provide scan searches. The scan databases retrieve information by scanning for strings of letters, numbers, or symbols appearing in the trademark word or phrase, as in a traditional database search. Entering "rank" in a scan database, for example, will retrieve RANK AND FILE, TOP RANK, and other marks containing the word "rank". Many of the scan databases are also designed to scan for character strings that appear in mid-word. For example, a search for mid-word occurrences of "rank" will retrieve CRANKY GIRLS CLUB; CYBER PRANKSTERS; FOR VALUE, NOTHING OUTRANKS AN ADMIRAL; and FRANKS-A-LOT. The other type of search method, Argentina Trademark the phonetic, is computer-controlled, and somewhat analogous to a natural language database search in that the computer determines the search parameters and results. For example, entering "ZANTAC" in an AvantIQ phonetic database will retrieve BYK SANGTEC, BANTAC, SKINTEC, and JONTEC. The phonetic databases are most efficient for searching coined words like ZANTAC, with its many possible spellings and variations, because the computer automatically searches combinations which would have to be searched separately on a scan database. In contrast, the scan databases give the searcher more control over the results because the searcher determines the possible variations of the mark. If properly conducted, a scan database search will be more comprehensive.
SEARCHING NON-WORD MARKS
Searching non-word marks in the electronic databases is difficult and not very reliable. In databases which have design searching capability, designs can be searched using design codes adopted by the PTO and based on a system established by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and/or by searching word descriptions of the design. Marks in which color is claimed as part of the mark can be searched in the Trademarkscan-Federal database using color codes adopted by the PTO. Other non-word marks, such as sound, can be searched only by using word descriptions of the non-word mark. Sound-only marks can be searched in Trademarkscan-Federal, using the command "DT = sound only". Non-word marks can be searched in Questel•Orbit's USMARK, using the /COMP command, e.g. "/COMP TRIANGLE AND BLUE".
Bolivia TrademarksBut as in all areas of the law, not e
