Protecting a brand and a design here

Companies entering Ukraine usually treat intellectual property registration as an administrative formality. It is a strategic decision with consequences that appear years later.

Register early

Ukraine, like most countries in the region, operates a first-to-file trademark system. The rights belong to whoever registered, not to whoever used the mark first.

The practical consequence is well known and still catches people: a company negotiates with a local partner, the partner registers the brand, and the company discovers it must buy its own trademark back. Register before you negotiate, not after.

Register broadly enough

Classes matter. A mark registered for one class of goods does not protect against use in another, and a company that registers narrowly to save fees discovers the gap when someone exploits it.

Register the Cyrillic transliteration as well as the Latin form. They are different marks, and consumers use both.

Designs and patents

Industrial design registration is cheap, fast and consistently neglected. For a product whose value is partly its appearance, it is often more useful than a patent.

Patents require the invention not to have been disclosed. Companies routinely destroy their own patentability by exhibiting at a trade fair before filing.

Enforcement

The most effective practical tool is customs registration: recording your rights with the customs service so that suspected counterfeits are stopped at the border. It works, it is inexpensive, and most rights holders never do it.

The advice

Spend a small amount at the beginning on registration done properly. The alternative is spending a large amount later on litigation to recover a position you could have held for a filing fee.

Registering a trademark before entering a market costs a few hundred euros; registering it afterwards costs a lawsuit and sometimes the mark itself. I met this in distribution: somebody had registered the name of a brand I represented before I got to it. Registration belongs near the top of the list of things done before selling, and it almost never is.