I had previously blogged about India's accession to the Madrid Protocol for the International Registration of Marks. Pursuant to this, the provisions relating to the registration of trademarks under the Madrid Protocol has come into force in India from the 8th of July, 2013. In order to enable this process, the Trademarks Act and Rules has been amended in 2010 and 2013 respectively. The Amendments to the Trademark Rules have also come into force from the same date. The Trademark Amendment Act and Rules can be found here and here.
Therefore, under the current system, any person, natural or legal, who is domiciled in India or is a national of India or which has a real and effective industrial or commercial establishment in India can get their registered trademarks or their pending applications for registration of trademarks registered under the Madrid Protocol by way of an online application. The Office of the Controller General Patents, Designs and Trademarks has issued a public notice stating that a gateway for making such an online application has been made available on the official website. The public notice also provides a contact id to direct queries about the Madrid Protocol and a telephone number for assistance with the online application and the other connected functions.
It has already been covered in our previous posts by Prashant that the Trademark Registry is grossly understaffed and that it is already suffering under a huge backlog. These posts are available here and here. At this juncture, when the Madrid protocol is coming into effect in India, it is likely to add substantial workload to the Trademark Registry. The registration of a trademark under the Madrid Protocol would require the satisfaction of a number of procedural formalities laid down in Chapter IVA of the Trademark Amendment Act, 2010 and the corresponding Trademark Rules, 2013, Therefore, in order to have a better functioning and more efficient Trademark protection system, it is of utmost importance that the Trademark Registry be provided the manpower and the resources that it requires.
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