Trademarks & similarity

emv

Can anyone help, I have run a limited company for the past 7 years and I thought I had all of the domains registered that related to it. I've noticed more & more people using the name including one sole trader who offers exactly the same services as me (but only started 2 years ago). She uses a domain name that I hadn't registered, .uk.com. I also noticed that my local Children's Centres have posters that say come to our groups in association with [my company name without the Ltd.] but they have nothing to do with me! I know this is causing confusion as lots of people are telling me they'll see me at x or y group when I'm not attending.

So I think I should register my name as a trademark. I will contact the local Council and the other person operating her business but having the backup of the trademark will be very helpful.

But here's my dilemma, a large charity has registered a similar trademark with very broad classes. Let's say they have registered Chalk and Cheese and I am Chalk to Cheese Ltd. What are the chances of the trademark not being registerable because of the similarity? The IPO will only give me a vague answer without me paying money to start the registration process so I was hoping someone here may have an idea.

Em

emv

Anyone able to help?!

paddyrg

So you have 2 problems, someone passing off as your business, and a possible clash with a charity.

Passing off person should be pretty easy to scare off with a solicitors letter if it's clear she's trading in the goodwill of your name. .uk.com domains are a joke by the way, not a true TLD. The registrar is likely to cave to a complaint pretty quickly.

The charity, hard to say without specifics, but the order of events is critical. If you're trading with a name and mark before they are, and you can prove it, it's their problem. Collect all evidence of your preexisting use of the mark and decide what result you want - charity not to use it, pay you royalty, buy you out etc., then approach them. You may want an IP lawyer. You can also get extremely competitively priced information from own-it.org certainly worth visiting their site.