All posts by Jérôme Coulonvaux

Non-conventional trademark – Color Mark

Non-conventional trademark – Part 1 – Color Mark

The route to registration for a sign is made up of several steps including an application to register it as a trademark. And within this application, and in order for it to be registered as a trademark, it must comply with a number of statutory rules.

If the most frequently occurring trademarks are “traditional” words, figurative and figurative marks with word elements, then a sign used in trade to identify the origin of products or services (the basic definition of a trademark) can also consist of non-traditional marks.

Without being too exhaustive, a list of “non-traditional” trademarks will include color marks, shape trademarks, sound marks, pattern marks, position marks, motion marks, multimedia marks or even hologram marks. In this article, we will focus on color and follow it with a series of articles on the other forms of non-conventional trademarks.

Can a pattern on a bus be protected as a trademark?

Can a pattern on a bus be protected as a trademark? An assessment of the distinctive character of non-traditional marks

A sign used in trade to identify the origin of products or services can consist of a ‘traditional’ word or figurative mark, on the one hand, or can have ‘non-traditional’ representation such as color, sound, multimedia or the position of visual element, on the other.
Nowadays, most IP Offices in the EU Member States are more lenient to accepting such non-traditional marks for registration. However as before, to be eligible for trademark registration, a sign must meet the requirement of distinctiveness.