Romania: Keep the marriage between trademarks and brands

Many IP offices make efforts to deliver IP rights quickly. The entire IP community, at least in Europe and the US, has been contaminated with the virus of “getting everything done with a click” and as a consequence patent and trademark registers are cluttered with thousands of rights whose quality is very low. The level of attention devoted by the owner to each individual right is therefore constantly diluted.

Trademarks are facing the danger of losing their essence, that is, identification of the origin of the goods and services. The result could be a “divorce” of the brand from the trademark.

I attended the Marques conference in Spain in September 2016 and its title was “Brands versus trademarks; trademarks versus brands”. In a presentation, Ricardo Perez, a specialist in brand creation (and not a trademark attorney), delivered a speech about meaningful brands. Throughout his presentation there was no intention whatsoever to link brands, ie, the commercial side of the trademark, with the company, which is the origin of the goods or services.