Insights

A Chinese trademark registration lasts ten years, but keeping it valid takes more than paying the renewal fee once a decade. Renewals have a fixed window, every change of the owner's name or address has to be recorded, and assignments follow rules that surprise foreign owners. This guide covers what has to be filed, when, and what goes wrong if it is not.

Thailand's Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) announced on its website on 30 September that it has linked the trade mark search system IP Search with the company registration data of the Department of Business Development (DBD): when searching a trade mark, the public and businesses can now immediately check the current status of the juristic person recorded as owner, as information to consider before a trade mark transaction or other disposal. According to the DIP press release issued on 29 September in the name of Director-General Oramon Sapthaweetham, the trade mark record in IP Search now displays an entry point for checking juristic-person status that links to the DBD DataWarehouse+, so the data comes directly from the authority responsible for company registration. Users can see at once when the owner is in a status such as dissolved with liquidation pending, dissolved with liquidation completed, or defunct and struck off.

Trademark rights are territorial: a registration in one country gives no protection in another. Exporters therefore end up managing a portfolio spread across several offices with different rules on filing basis, examination, opposition and use. This guide summarises the points that matter most in ten jurisdictions our clients file in most often. Figures are indicative for 2026 and change; always confirm current fees and timelines before budgeting.

Canada's regulator of patent and trade mark agents, the College of Patent Agents and Trademark Agents (CPATA), updated its scam warning for Canadian businesses and IP rights holders again on 28 September; the page was first published on 14 January 2025 and the updated list of schemes includes impersonating the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) or agencies by email, text and phone, demanding false trade mark renewal fees, claiming that a third party is applying to register your trade mark and creating urgency by pointing to Canada's first-to-file system in place since 2019, and fake opposition notices designed to create urgency.

The Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 28 September an Acuerdo establishing administrative simplification measures for various procedures before IMPI (trade mark applications), which substantially simplifies trade mark filing and merges application types and forms: the former separate procedures for traditional marks, collective marks, certification marks, slogans and the publication of trade names are consolidated into a single IMPI-01-001 'application for protection of distinctive signs'. Applications for non-traditional marks, namely holographic, sound, scent and trade dress marks and combinations of them, are consolidated into IMPI-01-002, which likewise covers collective and certification marks.

Trademarks are registered by class. The Nice Classification divides goods into classes 1 to 34 and services into classes 35 to 45, and CNIPA further splits every class into numbered sub-classes. Choose the wrong class and the registration will not protect the business it was meant for. These are the six classes that applicants get wrong most often.