Trade secrets, trade names, geographical indications and layout designs
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The remaining four industrial property subjects — two of which need no registration, and one owned by the state.
Beyond patents, designs and trademarks, four further industrial property subjects each work on their own logic.
Trade secrets
Information obtained from financial or intellectual investment, undisclosed and commercially usable.
No registration procedure. The right arises once the conditions are met — including a behavioural one: the owner must take reasonable measures to keep the information from being disclosed or easily accessed.
Many businesses skip this. Without confidentiality agreements, access controls or confidentiality markings, you will struggle in a dispute to show the information was a trade secret rather than ordinary know-how.
Protection is indefinite, until the information ceases to be secret. In exchange you cannot stop others independently developing the same thing or lawfully reverse-engineering a product sold on the market.
Three minimum measures: confidentiality agreements with staff and partners; need-to-know access with logging; and clear confidentiality markings.
Trade names
The name an organisation or individual uses in business to distinguish itself from others in the same field and area.
Arises from lawful use, not registration at the IP Office.
Worth emphasising: registering a company name with the business registry is not a trademark registration. The systems are independent. A validly registered company can still be sued for infringing someone's trademark and forced to rebrand — probably the most expensive misconception in this field.
Geographical indications
Signs identifying a product as originating from a specific area where its reputation, quality or characteristics are essentially due to that origin.
Two distinctive features: geographical indications are state-owned, and protection is indefinite while the conditions remain met. Producers in the region hold a right of use, not ownership.
This is the mechanism protecting the commercial value of regional agricultural products and specialities.
Semiconductor layout designs
The three-dimensional arrangement of circuit elements and their interconnections in a semiconductor integrated circuit.
The term has an unusual structure: it ends at the earliest of three dates — 10 years from filing; 10 years from first commercial exploitation by an entitled person; or 15 years from creation of the layout.
The term calculator on this site computes only the first — for this subject matter, check all three.
Unfair competition
Not a "right" evidenced by a title but a set of prohibited acts touching IP: using commercial indications that cause confusion about the trader, using marks protected in a treaty partner state, and registering domain names identical or confusingly similar to another's mark or trade name.
This regime is useful when you hold no protection title but are still being harmed — for instance when someone registers a domain matching the brand you are already trading under.