How to check a brand name's availability for Trademark Registration in India

Author: Madhavi Nagargoje

Brand names can be protected by its owners with the help of Trademark Registration in India. But to get a trademark registration, it should meet its most important criteria – It should not be registered to somebody else already! Now, the next question comes into picture and is the first step in getting your trademark registered – checking its availability for trademark registration.

The Registrar of Trademarks has provided with an open access to its database. Anybody can access this database and check the availability of his brand name for registration. This database also plays an important role for finalizing a brand name to begin with. It is very important that every entrepreneur or business check the availability of a brand name here before deciding to use it in the market. It can save up on all the investment made by you on a particular brand name and finding out that it belongs to someone else already! That would be the worst start to your business!

Now, even though the database is open access, it is not that easy to assure that your brand name will be guaranteed registration through the result provided by the same database. The Trade Marks Act provides for many conditions which, even though there does not exist an exact match brand name to yours in the database, will provide you with a trademark registration certificate.

Also, there are a few different ways in which you are allowed to check for the availability, so which one is the right one? And, the database can show you a result of numerous applications which is just impossible to check and ascertain a conclusion.

Let me help you out with the most reliable way to use the open database and check the availability online instantly. You can always reach out to us by filing the form on this page – Trademark Search. We will provide a completely FREE trademark search report for any number of brand names you have.

The page will look like this when it loads:

This page has 3 main sections which we have to input data in. They are – Search Type, Wordmark & Class. Choose the search type as – Wordmark. Input the first 3 letters of your brand name in the word mark section and change the default choice of "Start With" to "Contains". Input the class number in Class section. If you are not aware of your class number then check it on the link provided here – Trademark Classes. Let's check the search report for a random brand name – Gargant – in class 25. After making the data inputs as mentioned above, the page should look like this:

Now, press the Search icon at the bottom and wait for the result to be shown. The search results page should look like the one shown below:

That's showing a result of 1702 applications. It is very difficult to go through all those applications. So, to make it easy, just press and let the Find bar open. Now, input the brand name in it, but do it one letter at a time post the three letters you had already put. So, we will be putting "Garg" in the Find bar and checking which applications it is matching with. It should look something like this:

Okay! Let's start. Here is the link to the open-access database provided by the registrar.

after doing so, there were "0" entries which matched the word "Gargant". This automatically made it sure that the word "Gargant" was available to be trademarked as there was no application which either started or contained the word "Gargant" in its application.

As per our experience, this method works most of the time to find the availability of the brand name for trademarking. For any queries and assistance please contact us. We will help you out with this procedure for Free as our introductory service.