The legal registration of a trade mark confers to its owner an exclusive right over trade mark. At the same time, the fulfillment of the trademark advertising formalities ensures its opposition to any third party, who can no longer plead it did not know about the existence of the trademark, say lawyers specialized in intellectual property from Pavel, Margarit & Associates Romanian Law Firm.
The person who wants to protect its exclusive intellectual property right must hire a specialized lawyer.
If you find out that there are people who use or imitate your trademark without your consent, it is advisable to send them a formal notice requesting them to immediately cease use of the trademark without your agreement.
In legal language, the facts described above represent the counterfeiting of a trademark and are sanctioned both by civil law and by criminal law, and represent an offense.
If the situation is not solved amicably, you may use both civil action and criminal action.
Counterfeiting implies that the protected trade mark appears on a product belonging to the person who falsifies the trade mark in question, in order to mislead the consumer. Thus, the product assigns a different origin than the real one. The consumer will purchase the product, being convinced that it comes from the trademark owner, a company who delivers products that the customer considers safe and of good quality.
If that consumer is not satisfied with the counterfeit product, then he will no longer buy it. He will also communicate this to other consumers, thus spreading the mistrust over the products of the entrepreneur.
The existence of counterfeiting is a matter of the judge’s sovereign judgment. It is based on similarities between those products and involves the risk of a consumer being misled. There is no need to prove bad faith, and it is enough that this confusion is possible, there is no necessity for the confusion to occur. Therefore, if there is a likelihood of confusion, it is presumed that the damage has already occurred.
Whether we are talking about material damage, consisting in diminishing sales by deceiving buyers, or about image damage, perhaps even more serious and more difficult to repair than the material ones, the damage suffered by the proprietor of a trade mark in obvious. Injury coverage is made taking into account the general principle of full reparation of the damage caused by an unlawful act, namely the coverage of both the actual damage and the unrealized benefit.
Here are some elements that the judge will take into account when quantifies the injury: the negative economic consequences, in particular, the loss of earnings suffered by the injured party, the unjustly gained benefits by the person who violated a protected intellectual property right, elements other than economic factors such as the non-pecuniary damage caused to the holder of the infringement.
Both in the civil and criminal field, the infringement action can be joined by the unfair competition, say the lawyers specialized in the intellectual property from Pavel, Margarit & Associates Romanian Law Firm.