Last week we analysed the Patent landscape in India, this week we look at Trademark.
As per WIPO 13.4 million, Trademark applications were filed worldwide in 2020, of which only 3.3 lakhs were filed in India. The country has also seen a substantial increase in terms of trademark activity.
As per WIPO Report, China is the largest office for trademark applications, with 93.4 lakh applications being filed in 2020, and the USA with 8.7 lakh applications stands at second position whereas India has climbed up to 5th place after the Islamic Republic of Iran and the European Union Intellectual Property Office with 5.4 lakh and 4.3 lakh trademark applications respectively.
According to the same WIPO report as shown above in the graph, China granted over 57 lakh trademark applications, the USA granted around 4 lakh applications whereas India granted only about 2.5 lakh applications. In 2019, India granted 3.67 lakh applications.
In 2020, after China and USA, India has the 3rd largest trademarks in force with around 24lakh trademarks, followed by Japan and France.
Non-resident applicants only accounted for between 2-3% of total trademark filing in China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Out of 4,47,805 Trademark applications filed in India during 2021-22, only 13,808 were filed by non-residents.
In India, the first stage of examination of a Trademark application is the fastest globally as it is done within 2-3 days. The entire process of registration is completed in about 8-10 months in case there is no objection received. In case of any objection, the application procedure may take around 18 months because in absence of any prescribed time limit the notification of the hearing date takes several weeks. The long wait time can sometimes lead to a delay of up to 5 to 10 years for the application to be processed.
The shortage of manpower, especially at the senior level is one of the key issues behind the slow processing of applications. When compared globally India has 156 examiners which are far less than China’s 2000 examiners and USA’s 633 examiners. As a result, 2.4 lakh applications were pending at the opposition stage in June 2022 and 2.6 lakhs were pending at the show cause hearing stage. India needs to hire more manpower to dispose off its pending case, and fast-track the approval of trademark applications.
Time and again contractual examiners are hired to share the office workload, but scaling up permanent hiring of examiners is required to meet the sanctioned strength of the examiner.
Other issues that attribute to the delay in the Trademark application are the negligence in the following statutory deadlines set by Trademark Rules 2017. For example, Rule 33 of the Trademark Rule prescribes the deadline for submission of reply to be 30 days from the date of receipt of notification of the examination report, but this deadline is easily breached without changing the application of status. Also, as per Rule 50 of the Trademark Act, 2017, no party is allowed more than two adjournments, and each adjournment should not exceed 30 months, but, in practice, more than 2 adjournments are not only filed by the parties, the Trademark Office also grant such adjournments.
Not only the manpower should be escalated but efforts should also be put to make sure that statutory deadlines are being completely followed and more time limitations rules should be introduced. Similarly, not all steps in the process mandatorily require human intervention, automation of these steps would help accelerate the registration process. For example, a notice of opposition/ counter statement can be automatically mailed, this will not only add speed to the process but will also save time and reduce the workload on the registrar.
