Research On Legal Protection Of The Unregistered Trademark

Our country implements the trademark registration system to acquire the trademark right. This not only brings great convenience to our country's trademark management, but also plays an important role in maintaining the market order. However, any systems always face many problems in the process of department . After our country executed trademark registration system,there are many unregistered trademarks still. So now our country faces huge challenges, such as how to evaluate the legal status of these unregistered trademarks and how to protect and administrate these unregistered trademarks.In the purpose of conforming to the international trend, our country revised the Trademark Law in 2001, while increased the protection of unregistered well-known trademarks and unregistered trademarks which have certain influence. But the weak protection have not prohibited the behaviors of infringing upon unregistered trademarks. Nowadays, in the world many countries use anti-unfair competition law to complement the blank of the trademark law. Our country also legislated the Anti-unfair Competition Law in 1993. But because its threshold is high and it is hardly to grasp in practice, so it does not wholly protect the unregistered trademarks. Now as the economy of our country enters into a high-speed development stage and a large number of unregistered trademarks are emerging, so the behaviors of infringing upon unregistered trademarks emerge endlessly. Obviously our trademark law system has seemed not to be enough in dealing with the behaviors of infringing upon unregistered trademarks.Therefore the author expounds the connotation, the protecting conditions of unregistered trademarks, and then introduces the protection of unregistered trademark in detail in the view of legislature and judiciary, so as to analyze the insufficient protection. After that the author advises our country to learn of the advanced experiences. The first place, our country should bring unregistered trademarks into the framework of Trademark law and give the prior right of use to the user of unregistered trademarks. At the same time our country also should limit the prior right of use in order to encourage the user of unregistered trademarks to register the trademarks. The second place, our Anti-unfair Competition Law should set a general provision, and protect the unregistered trademarks clearly and definitely so as to practise conveniently. Then it will display the whole protection to the Trademark Law.