Trademark Fee and Fee for Expedited Examination go up!
We blogged a while ago regarding the proposed increase in fee for trademark application (http://sevenelementz.net/legal/tm-registry-to-hike-costs-for-trademark-registration/). Coming as a surprise notification, the Trade Mark Registry posted an update on its website on August 7, 2014 notifying the fee increase of Rs. 500 in trademark application fee, i.e., from Rs. 3500 to Rs. 4000. Also, the fee for expedited examination is increased to Rs. 20,000. The notification can be seen (http://ipindia.nic.in/iponew/publicNotice_07August2014.pdf)
What changes the stakeholders expect to see?
One can only hope that such fee increase would add revenue so more competent and qualified resources can be employed and consequently it would increase the efficiency of existing operations and reduce the pendency of applications.
Another worrying scenario is the quality of objections raised by the examiners, which as per our own calculations stand at 98%, which is quite high (by sampling 1000 applications and . It is a common complaint among the overseas clients that their trademarks are always objected in India, while they are approved without any hassles in other jurisdictions despite their trademark being inherently distinctive or a coined mark. In other instances, the responses to examination reports are never being looked into and that the registry let the applications proceed to the next step, i.e., hearing.