Presentation 2

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you very much for coming to my presentation. Let me introduce myself. I am César Ramirez, and I am a lawyer working for an international law firm. Today I would like to give a general overview of the growing and really broad area of trademark law. So I’ll be addressing three main points, and the first one is going to be “what”. What we protect when we say “trademarks” and what we actually mean by the word “trademark”. The second point will be why we care about trademarks and why we should be concerned with trademarks. And finally, the last point is how we protect trademarks, how the law is concerned with trademarks, and how courts and judges protect trademarks. Excuse me.

So let me just turn to my first point. What a trademark is, is a very important question because that will determine whether or not we’ve got a flame and we’ve got a right. So the first thing to note is that a trademark is any sign that could be used by a trader to identify his or her goods from other traders’ and at the same time to distinguish those goods from the goods of other traders. The concept of a sign has not always been the same, though. It’s been changing over time and is actually being broadened and broadened as time goes by. So in the beginning for example, a trademark would just be used as an identifier. Nowadays, for example, a trademark can be used, for example as a general appearance, as the persona, as the image, etc. of a general company. So the concept has actually been evolving and growing very, very steadily and fast over the past decades.

The second question is “Why we protect trademarks?” and over here I would like to draw your attention to the fact … and to the actual rationale behind the protection and, at the same time, I would like to talk about two main points here. The first one is consumers, while the second one is the information. So the reason why we protect trademarks is because they are supposed to be carries of information that tell the consumer where the goods come from and at the same time, they reassure the consumer that the goods they are buying, he or she is buying, come from the same undertaking, from the same origin and is a constant quality. So rather than me going into a supermarket and trying to find out whether or not those goods are actually of a good quality, the quality I expect, I can just use the trademark, and always expect the same quality with confidence. So that is the rationale of main protection for trademarks.

Finally, this point brings me to my second, to my third point, which is … so and this brings me to my third point, and last point, which is, how we protect trademarks, and at this point I would like to draw your attention to the fact that there is a very basic and, at the same time, very important principle in trademark law which is “confusion”. We protect trademarks to the extent that there is confusion, and that is … not only the consumer is confused as to the origin of the goods but also, if the consumer is confused, as to the fact that the goods may be affiliated or could be endorsed or sponsored by the producer.

So this third point brings me to the end of my presentation.

To summarise, we’ve looked at what a trademark is and its definition. We’ve looked at why we protect trademarks and why we are concerned with them, and thirdly we’ve looked at how we protect them. So, I hope and I trust that this has given you a really good insight into what trademark law is and that it might be thought-provoking for you. Thank you very much for listening and if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ask.