The low cost of trademark registration brings about what impacts and changes
The changes in trademark registration application fees are quite puzzling. With China's rapid economic development, rising incomes, and increasing labor costs, the prices of various goods and services have also risen significantly. However, the intellectual property service industry, which relies mainly on talent and knowledge input and where labor costs are the highest, should have seen a much larger increase in trademark registration service prices. Instead, service prices have developed in reverse, not only not rising but also continuously declining.
Since the implementation of the agency system for trademark registration in 1992, the industry's trademark application and registration fees were relatively standardized, with a total cost of around 2000 yuan, including a 1000 yuan government fee and a 1000 yuan domestic trademark agency fee. After the cancellation of the approval of agency institution qualifications and the absence of entry requirements, market chaos increased, with low-price malicious competition and declining agency quality disrupting the healthy development of the trademark industry. With the advent of the internet age, the entry of some online companies and trademark e-commerce platforms, with their low-price and free marketing models, has once again impacted the pricing of the trademark registration agency industry. In recent years, trademark government fees have also been continuously reduced, from the previous 1000 yuan to 300 yuan after three reductions, causing the overall trademark registration fee to decrease significantly. Whether the excessively low trademark registration cost is good or bad, and what impact it has on the trademark service industry, this article will provide a brief commentary.
First, the excessively low cost of trademark registration has misled enterprises about the professionalism, complexity, and intangible asset value of trademarks, devaluing the value of intellectual property service professionals.
Since the cancellation of trademark agency qualifications and the excessively low cost of trademark registration, many enterprises mistakenly believe that trademark registration is very simple and can be handled by anyone without professional knowledge or experience. Is this really the case?
Trademark registration itself, while seemingly a simple procedural application, actually involves many complex and professional issues. For example, the pre-application trademark search and evaluation involves the complex issue of judging the similarity of prior trademarks, the distinctiveness of the trademark, and many legally prohibited absolute clauses such as adverse effects. These require agents with extensive legal knowledge and professional experience to provide correct evaluations and guidance to reduce enterprise risks and improve the success rate of trademark registration. Some agents, due to a lack of basic professional knowledge and professional ethics, either do not conduct searches for the trademarks submitted by enterprises or pretend to understand after conducting searches, deceiving clients, making false promises, and misleading enterprises. Because enterprises are unaware of the risks, they believe that there is absolutely no problem with applying for a trademark and begin large-scale trademark use, promotion, and production and operation before the trademark is successfully registered. When they learn that they cannot register and stop using it, their previous large economic investment is wasted, resulting in heavy losses. When they look for agents again, either the agents have disappeared or the issues are unresolved.
Second, the excessively low registration cost has given rise to a group of trademark traffickers, boosting the trademark trading market.
These trademark traffickers take advantage of the convenience of online applications or direct acceptance windows to hoard trademarks and resell them, registering them at a cost of only 300 yuan and reselling them at prices ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan through various trademark trading platforms, thereby obtaining high profits. Due to the large number of trademark applications, trademark registration is becoming increasingly difficult, and some enterprises have to choose to directly purchase existing trademarks, thus giving rise to many enterprises investing in trademark trading platforms, making the buying and selling of trademarks a booming business.
Third, the excessively low registration cost has exacerbated the increase in useless and junk trademarks, increasing the pressure on trademark examination and the maintenance costs for enterprises.
Trademark facilitation reforms, optimized registration procedures, and the full opening of online applications and lowering of registration fees have, on the one hand, promoted the exponential and rapid growth of trademark applications; on the other hand, they have also brought enormous pressure on the examination time limit and quality of the examination authorities, making the contradiction between insufficient examiners and the surge in applications even more prominent.
Enterprises are in a dilemma regarding trademark registration protection: on the one hand, to prevent trademarks from being preempted, enterprises have to register a large number of defensive trademarks to expand registration protection, increasing registration costs; on the other hand, a large number of unused defensive trademarks face the risk of being revoked by others for three years of non-use. To prevent revocation, they have to increase the cost of trademark registration maintenance. The excessively low registration cost has also led to an increase in trademark traffickers, resulting in more and more useless and idle trademarks and junk trademarks, seriously hindering the normal application and use of trademarks by enterprises.
In short, the fundamental reason for the chaotic phenomenon in the trademark agency industry is the lack of entry barriers, with many low-quality personnel entering the industry. These people cannot provide services to enterprises based on professional skills and can only rely on low-price malicious competition, inducing clients or using dual identities to preempt and hoard trademarks for resale at high prices to obtain huge profits. These chaotic phenomena have also brought adverse effects to many formal and excellent agency institutions.
Practice has proved that the trademark agency industry mainly relies on professional knowledge and experience. Completely removing entry requirements and lowering registration costs is undoubtedly detrimental to the healthy development of the industry, and the side effects and impacts it brings are worth reflecting on. Based on the characteristics of the trademark industry, there have been repeated calls to restore the qualification requirements for trademark agency institutions to fundamentally solve the problem of low professional quality in the trademark agency team and improve the quality of trademark agency services. This issue has remained unresolved for many years. With price-based malicious competition, the excessively low registration cost has exacerbated the hoarding and malicious preemption of trademarks.
