Entrepreneurs urged to register IP rights early
Published on: Monday, July 27, 2015
Alor Setar: Entrepreneurs should register their intellectual property (IP) rights way before they go to the public to protect their product's/services' brands from the competitors', says IP Gennesis Sdn Bhd Intellectual Property Consultant, Lawrence Tan.According to him, most of the entrepreneurs were not aware of the importance of registering their rights.This might result in them having the same brand names like other companies', he said.
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"Some companies will only get their brands registered after a few years of operation and after spending so much money on the packaging."Therefore, I would advise them to register their brands the moment they decided to set up a business. By doing so, it would help them protect the brand before it's even approved," he said.The approval of the brand by the Intellectual Property Corp of Malaysia may take up to a year.Tan said US multinational technology company, Apple Inc, had to pay US$60 million to buy the name 'Ipad' from a China company as the latter had used the brand a few years before Apple's penetration into China. He also suggested companies choose unique names that were not relevant to what they were selling.
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"If your brand is called Pisang Goreng (banana fritters) it will be unfair to the other competitors who also want to register the same brand," he said, adding that the cost to register a brand was about RM2,000.Meanwhile, Chief Operating Officer at Centre for Entrepreneur Development and Research (CEDAR), Dr Sheikh Ghazali Abod, said being the backbone of the economy, the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) should start to look at branding as the way to go.
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