Logo Protection

Although you may have an automatic copyright in your logo, copyright is insufficient protection for logos. If someone copied your logo, to be able to stop them through copyright you would need to be able to prove that they actually copied your logo, and did not come up with the same design independently. This is extremely difficult to do.

There are two ways to strengthen protection for your logos in the UK or Europe. One is to register the logo as a registered design but it must be designed less than 12 months ago for this to be feasible.

It is also possible to register the logo as a trademark either on its own or combined with your word mark.

The protection you receive in each case is subtly different, and ideally you should do both if you can afford it. Once a logo is registered with design rights, you would be able to stop anyone else using a confusingly similar logo whether they happen to have come up with the same logo independently or not. There is no need to prove they copied your logo.

Your trade mark protection for the logo will be greater if you register it on its own and register your word mark separately on its own. However, as a first step it is a good option to register them together as a combined mark. These are general comments, and it does depend on how you use your mark as to which option is the best for you.

One advantage of protecting your logo as both a registered design and as a trademark is to increase your chances of stopping others using your logo.

We often hear from clients whose logos have been copied by other websites on the web, and if they had registered design and trade mark protection, it would be easeier to stop others copying their brand in this way.

There are two different registers in which we search your logo depending whether you want to register your logo as a registered design or as a trade mark.

What happens next?

Find out more about registering a registered design a trademark or contact us.