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So first of all, I'm going to talk about trademarks and why we have trademarks here.

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Side Business School has trademark trademarks important to all businesses.

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In fact, for some businesses, they're probably the most important things that they have.

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What is a trademark? Well, originally, the very simple idea of a trademark was it was an indication of origin.

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So if you bought products that you thought were good or you've gone to a shop which provided good service,

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etc., you want to be able to go there again.

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You also want to be able to tell other people to go there and the business wants you to tell other people to go there too.

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So it's an indication of origin.

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It's a way of identifying the goods or services you're providing in a way where people can show, can identify where they've come from.

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Their most useful trademarks, I would say, to to establish businesses.

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If you don't have any reputation at all, a trademark really isn't very valuable because you don't have any customers.

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Nobody needs to know where to go. But established businesses find trademarks very, very important.

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And even companies which their main business is, is based upon selling things cheaply.

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And thus volumes would be perhaps marginal over marginal profits, but very big turnovers.

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Perhaps take little or oldie but sell very good products, but sell them very cheaply and that they're not really providing anything new.

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And the type of products they're selling, they're selling pretty standard products, but people want to go back.

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So even they need to have a trademark such identifies the origin, the goods they're selling.

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So what is a trademark?

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It's a sign which is capable of being represented graphically and capable of distinguishing goods or services of a particular person.

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So that's all they or whatever. You don't have to actually know who they are.

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But what you do need to know is that this product comes from this person or this business,

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and it's got to be something recognisable or can't be registered as a trademark.

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Well, it can't be registered trademark. If it can't be represented in a graphical form, that means you write it down.

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But something that's visible and that's just not as limited as you might think because it's possible to have trademarks which are smells.

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Which are videos music.

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As long as you can describe them in some sort of graphical way, then you can protect it and you're not allowed to register all trademarks.

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If there's a mark already on the register with which it conflicts and you're not allowed to have a second one for the registration for the same thing,

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unless of course, sure, it's the same proprietor. It's the same applicant.

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It's not simply descriptive. So if I'm selling sweets, I can't call them minty or whatever, because it's descriptive of the sweets.

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It's got to be something which which actually identifies the product in a way which distinguishes it from other products.

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And I can't actually use the shape of the product, the trademark.

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And a classic case of that was the Coca Cola bottle.

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And Coca Cola tried very hard to register the shape of their bottle as a trademark.

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The court said, no, you can't. You're basically trying to get a monopoly in your in your bottle, in your product through the trademark system.

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That's not the way you should be doing it. Getting it through the design system, whatever.

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And you can't have it. So the Coca-Cola bottle is not a registered trademark.

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There's no point having any sort of intellectual property protection unless you can enforce it.

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And in the case of trademarks, you have to establish various things.

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You have to show that the use of the competitor of which you're complaining was used in the course of trade.

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That means they are actually in business. If you're just using it, theoretically, it's not in the course of trade.

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It has to be without the consent of the proprietor and it has to be in relation to the goods for which the mark is registered.

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So if I have registration for baked beans, that doesn't, on the face of it, cover use of the market in relation to lemonade.

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That's just the starting position. There are some other provisions which say, well,

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if you use it in relation to similar goods and you may be able to argue that lemonade was similar in some way to another product.

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You might also be able to stop people using a similar mark in relation to similar goods, but the more,

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the more you get away from the original registration that the more difficult it is to establish your case.

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But it's broad protection, so it will protect you from people using marks similar to yours,

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and also using marks which are similar to yours on goods which are similar to those which the mark is registered

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and you have to register them all in relation to particular goods or services or classes of goods or services.

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Just mentioned very briefly there are other trademark registrations which are so famous that almost any use of those marks,

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which is detrimental or is unfair, may get you into trouble.

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And, you know, I suppose it might be said that.

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Oxo we all know about Oxo. Maybe that's that's a very famous trademark.

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Apple very new trademark. In some ways, almost any use of that apple symbol on goods of any description probably may get you into trouble,

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perhaps giving you just one example of a similar similar mark.

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The Coca-Cola Company again sued people in Scotland who were selling a product called Cola Cola.

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And you might have thought that that wasn't very similar. But if you're Scottish, you don't say Kabala Cola.

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I'm talking about Kabala, which is the creature that lives in Australia. They would they'd probably say Cola, cola.

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And when they said Coca Cola they probably said hula.

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So the two were very similar, but they weren't similar enough and Coca Cola couldn't stop that.

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It's not the end of the world if you can't get a trademark registration.

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There is a the law will prevent people from deceiving other people, deceiving customers.

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And the course of that business, even if you haven't got a trademark rather straight registration.

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If you can show that you've got goodwill is in the sense of an assets in the business, an established business and a reputation.

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People know who you are. If you sell fish, they know your shop.

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They know your name. Now, if somebody else tries to pretend that they are providing your goods or they're operating your business dishonestly,

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then you may be able to stop them. But you have to show you've got a reputation.

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You have to show that if you've got a business in the UK and you have to show that customers have been deceived.

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A classic example of this was the Jif Lemon case.

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I'm sure some of you may be familiar with this. The Jif lemon was actually a little plastic lemon containing lemon juice.

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And it was very popular at certain times of the year. There was nothing special about lemon juice.

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It was just ordinary lemon juice in a little plastic container that looked like a lemon.

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Another company in America came out with a product which looked very similar, not the same shape of lemon, but bigger, but still a plastic lemon.

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And the people who owned the Jif product, who called Richard Coleman objected to this product on the market.

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They said that it was being used to deceive customers.

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And they carried out some market research.

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They put the competitors plastic lemons on a shelf in the shop.

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And when people picked it up and took it to the checkout, they they asked them what they had bought.

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And a large number of them said they had bought a Jif lemon.

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So record. And Coleman said these customers are being deceived.

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They want you to buy a jif lemon but they bought something else and they didn't realise it.

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And the court said that these things are a matter of fact and they should be

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allowed to stop people selling goods in a form which deceives the customer.

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And it can be quite trivial. And that was a misrepresentation as to the origin of the goods.

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But there could also be other types of misrepresentation which could be in relation to quality.

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And one example some years ago was that this company called Spalding, which makes sporting goods,

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they sold tennis balls and some of them were your work were seconds, they weren't perfect.

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So they sold them off cheaply and they were marked as seconds.

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However, a shop. Purchase a large quantity of second rate tennis balls.

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And sell them as the real thing. Now.

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There was no misrepresentation as the origin of the product.

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They've all came from Spalding. There's no suggestion otherwise.

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But there was a representation that the product was perfect as first class and that people played with it.

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Some of them burst or whatever, and it damaged the reputation of Spalding.

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So any sort of misrepresentation in the course of business can cause problems.