When the industrial and commercial departments investigate and deal with cases of counterfeiting registered trademarks, they often see the parties holding the Notice of Acceptance for trademark registration issued by the State Trademark Office saying that their trademarks have been registered and it is impossible to counterfeit registered trademarks. These parties have committed the crime of not knowing the trademark registration procedure, which confuses the two concepts of the acceptance of trademark registration application and the approval of trademark registration.
A newly applied trademark has many steps from application to certification: it usually takes nearly two years from submitting an application for trademark registration to obtaining an acceptance notice, to substantive examination, preliminary examination announcement, approval announcement and final certification. If someone objects to the trademark during the announcement, the registration time will be longer.
When an applicant for trademark registration submits a complete application for trademark registration to the Trademark Office, the Notice of Acceptance issued by the State Trademark Office is only the beginning of the trademark registration procedure. The function of this notice is similar to the receipt, and it is the certificate given to the parties by the Trademark Office after receiving the application. The notice of acceptance only indicates that the Trademark Office has accepted the application for trademark registration, but does not indicate whether the application can be approved. In fact, although the Trademark Office has accepted a considerable number of trademark registration applications, they have all been rejected after examination and finally failed to register successfully.
The document that proves the legality of the use of a registered trademark is the trademark registration certificate. Therefore, before obtaining the trademark registration certificate, the trademark is still unregistered. If the trademark is used on the goods before this time and the registered trademark is marked, it constitutes a counterfeit registered trademark. In addition, if an unregistered trademark is shoddy, shoddy or deceives consumers, and a logo that cannot be used as a trademark is used as a trademark, it will be fined less than 20% of the illegal business amount or less than 2 times the illegal profit. The use of unregistered trademarks also carries the risk of infringing on the exclusive right of others to register trademarks.