The success of a brand on the market is the goal of any business organization, but in some cases the excess of success can generate, in legal terms, the risk of forfeiture of the rights of the trademark.
Terms such as aspirin, bikini, biro, cellophane, jeeps, linoleum, etc.. – originally trademarks – have got “popularized” therefore becoming common words that identify a kind of goods and not their first productive source: this outcome is a significant harm to the right holder, starting to lack the distinctive capacity, a key element of its validity and, at the same time, it can represent a tremendous opportunity for competitors to obtain the forfeiture of the industrial patent.
In any case – defence or attack of a trademark right – it is first necessary to carry out a specific activity of “internet brand intelligence” to understand the existing situation and its ‘peculiar symptoms’: frequency of citation of the term/trademark as a common word, or combined/not combined with indications of the status (e.g. the presence of logos ®, ™, “registered trademark”, etc..), frequency of co-citation of the brand under the name of the owner, presence in the Network of interventions of the Owner or of his delegates or persons entitled, aiming at the clarification of the “status”, etc..
The methodologies and solutions of “brand intelligence” of Convey are able to generate, in a short time, in-depth analysis reports on the defence or the attack of such IP rights: the results are properly documented in a dossier.