- Read more about the criteria for trademark registrations
- Learn how we can help you with trademark management
- Read more about how you monitor and enforce pre-existing trademarks
Do you want to prevent others from freeloading on your good name and reputation that you nurtured for years? Then you should consider applying for a trademark to protect the characteristic features of your business: You can protect everything from company and product names to logos, slogans, sounds and colours.
Your brand, awareness of your company and the quality of your goods and services are important factors when your customers choose whom they want to give their business. And all of this may be protected with the right trademarks. A trademark helps you prevent competitors from imitating or getting too close to your brand. With a trademark, you have the strongest hand possible should you end up in a dispute or lawsuit on infringement.
In Denmark, you obtain a right just by having marketed your product. This means that you may be successful in having an injunction issued to have further sales prohibited and to have any imitations recalled, even though you have not applied for protection by registering a trademark. But this right is only enforceable in Denmark – and we never recommend relying on unregistered rights.
Your trademark must meet three requirements in order to be granted protection:
- It must be capable of distinguishing the goods and services of your business from those of other businesses
- It must be capable of being reproduced in a way that makes it possible to determine the clear and precise subject matter of protection
- It must have a distinctive character
There is also a range of things that are not allowed when it comes to trademarks, including but not limited to:
- Your trademark must not be descriptive (for example, you may register the mark GOLD for coffee, but not for jewellery)
- You must not include official state emblems or symbols, such as the Danish flag, without permission
- You must not infringe the trademarks of others
