You may think you own your logo – after all your company has paid for it!

But you may find differently when you decide to move design studios and the incumbent designer says they ‘own’ the copyright.

Perhaps you think this sounds like a tall story? If only… but it continues to happen when some designers refuse to hand over design files, claiming copyright ownership, and placing restrictions on what their client can do with their own logo or trade mark.

Only last year a new client of ours faced exactly this, forcing them to rebrand at additional time and cost.

At Hot PJ we don’t believe in this approach – if you pay for it, your logo is your logo. We’ll help you to protect it, but we won’t use copyright as a tool to punish you if you decided to leave.

Protecting Your Rights

One of the ways to protect your exclusive rights to your logo or trade mark is to register it with the Intellectual Property Office in the countries where you operate.

Up until recently the costs and perceived complexities of registration often precluded companies from doing so. Recently Intellectual Property law firm James & Wells launched IPOL, an online tool for registering trade marks and design applications in New Zealand.

The site provides online ‘wizards’ to help you draft and file your own application in NZ for a fee of $250 ($150 to IPOL plus Government fees of $100 for a design and $100 per class for a trade mark).

Selecting the right ‘Class’ for your Trade mark or Logo

Selection of the right class for your list of goods and services can be the complex part. But the IPOL ‘help’ wizard does guide you through this process. If you get really stuck you can pay for additional help with your application from an IPOZ advisor. There are very reasonable set fees for:

• help with checking the registration for trade marks that might block your application ($600),
• an opinion on whether your trade mark qualifies as a trade mark under NZ law ($100),
• help from an IPOL Advisor to check the acceptability of your list of goods/services ($100).

Easy to use, lots of ‘help’ options

Having tried IPOL as a first time user to register a logo as a trade mark, I found it quite easy to use – a bit of form filling at the start that seemed repetitive, but once underway with my application I found plenty of onsite ‘help’ that answered any questions I had.

So first check with your designer that you do own the copyright to your logo, then use IPOL to register an application to protect your exclusive rights to it. If you don’t you risk others claiming or using something similar to promote their own business, service or goods. If their offering is inferior to yours this could hurt your business reputation.

Also see:

• Protecting Your Brand – IP solicitor Dan Winfield of A J Park explains
• Do you own your own logo?

You might also be interested in:

• Got a marketing hurdle you can’t get over? Book a free ‘Think Tank’ session
• A Rebrand is not just a change of Logo
• Getting to Know Your Logo – a guide

Posted on April 29th, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing