Did you know that registering a business name or purchasing a domain name is not the same as a trade mark? It’s a common misconception. 

To address this confusing area for businesses, IP Australia has launched a new tool, Trade Mark Assist, to help businesses identify the right classes for a trade mark on their goods or services, guided by Virtual Assistant Alex. Alex can answer general trade mark questions in real time and in plain English.

Trade Mark Assist’s cutting edge artificial intelligence was developed with IP Australia’s technology partner, TrademarkVision, a Queensland start-up that has developed artificial intelligence and image recognition technology.

The tool has been designed to help businesses ‘Learn, search, apply’, first educating self-filers (those applicants without a trademark attorney) how to protect their brands and gain the legal rights to it.

According to IP Australia, Trade Mark Assist can help applicants explore a proposed trade mark, discover if a proposed trade mark contains a word or phrase that may be difficult to register, identify the goods and services you wish to protect and search for existing trade marks that may be a problem.

Over 76,000 applicants filed for a trade mark in 2017, making this IP Australia’s largest filing category. Many of these will only file once. 

IP Australia’s Director General, Patricia Kelly, said that assisting trade mark customers is a high priority for IP Australia. “I’m pleased to say that Trade Mark Assist reduces the complexity of filing a trade mark and will benefit our trade mark customers, especially our self-filers. Trade Mark Assist utilises machine learning algorithms to provide tailored information to customers which we hope will increase customer satisfaction and improve the quality of trade mark applications,” Kelly said.

For businesses like menswear start-up InStitchu, protecting trade marks is vital to the business. Managing Director and Co-Founder at InStitchu Robin McGowan says “The more successful your business becomes the more valuable your brand is, so you want to invest in it. One way is to protect it with a trade mark to have full control of its use. Think of a trade mark as a business asset that can be franchised, licensed or sold. For us, our brand is literally stitched into our product, so it’s important it’s protected.”

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