Protecting Your Intellectual Property in Thailand When Attending Trade Fairs

Bangkok, Thailand now has an increasing number of trade fairs in which participants from several industries like tech, automotive, medical, creative, design and even the furniture industries come to showcase their business and their respective products and services to foreign investors to give them the opportunity to create business partnerships and even acquire customers. One caveat with trade fairs though is when you showcase your innovative product or service to other businesses, you run the risk of having it stolen or copied by other participants.

The way other businesses might not straight up copy what innovative product or service you have but, they might get an idea, and reverse engineer your whole idea, or pick some part of it to use for their own products and services. The good news is though, that there are ways for you to protect your intellectual property, so you don’t worry from other companies trying to steal your innovative ideas before you enter a trade fair.

Announcing Your IP Ownership

You can use signs and symbols to announce to the public in appropriate areas your corresponding ownership of the intellectual property.

• © – The symbol for copyright, you may use this alongside the year when your publication or creation was published. This is applicable for works like websites, photos, audio, software, or brochures, etc.
• ® – This symbol signifies a registered trademark. Be careful in using this as using this when your trademark is not registered is against the law.
• ™ – You should use this symbol when your trademark application has already been submitted and under processing already.
• Patent Pending – Just like the ™ symbol, only for patents.
• Patent <Number> – You may now use your issued patent rights once it has been granted.

Shall Infringement in a Trade Fair Occur

If you have noticed and confirmed an infringement performed in the trade fair, below are the following steps you should follow in order to properly process the enforcement against the infringement.

1) Send Them a Notice

You may send the infringer a letter that informs them about your intellectual property, and the potential that they might have been infringing on it.

2) Send a Cease and Desist Letter

This is a more aggressive letter compared to just notice, this usually triggers legal actions against the infringer.

3) Raid

These are physical searches of the infringer’s things, and usually done without the infringer’s presence, and are done to catch them by surprise.

4) Investigate

This is done to assure that the infringer is not taking the counterfeit goods from a bigger supplier which is definitely a bigger issue.

5) Take Legal Action

This seldom happens, and they are usually just a last resort when anything else fails.

CtR Intellectual Property Co. is a Hong Kong Patent Application Grant authorised patent agent offering PAG agent service, professional trademark and patent application & related services. We have more than 100 cases of PAG application experience in the past 5 years, and the application success rate is over 86%. For details of the PAG, international patent application and trademark registration, please contact us for free consulation.

CtR Intellectual Property Co.

Hong Kong Patent Application Grant Authorised Patent Agent

Offering Professional Patent and Trademark Application & Related Services

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