Trade mark applicants: beware of false publications!
For several years now, unscrupulous commercial companies have been directly soliciting holders of industrial property rights, particularly trade mark applicants. They offer, in exchange for often exorbitant fees, superfluous or even useless services, or services that are normally free of charge.
With increasing digitization and online accessibility of national, regional, and international industrial property registers, this phenomenon is amplifying. Malicious entities easily access personal information about applicants for trade marks, designs, patents, or domain names, such as their names, postal addresses, and sometimes even their email addresses and telephone numbers.
The most common scam in the field of trade marks involves offering publication services for trade mark applications in dubious, sometimes non-existent journals.
It is crucial to know that only national patent and trademark offices (such as INPI in France), regional offices (such as EUIPO for European Union trade marks), or WIPO for international trademarks, are authorized to publish such information in their official journals and registers. Only these official publications have legal value. Furthermore, publication fees are generally included in the application/registration fees and are set by official regulations. They are public and can be consulted on the websites of the relevant offices.
Any other publication, if it exists at all, would be entirely superfluous from a strictly legal standpoint.
The best advice we can give you is that anything not coming from a trademark office or from your IP attorney should be considered suspicious.
And, if in doubt, DO NOT PAY and contact us!
INSCRIPTA
Image by Jonathan Hammond under Pixabay licence
