The Legal Protection On The Sound Mark

Multi-sensory experience mode, which including tactile sense, olfaction, and gustation, is utilized in market competition by commodity producers and service providers. Sound mark is a kind of trademark, which uses the sound to distinguish the source of products or service from one enterprise to others. Comparing with single visual trademark, sound mark is much easier to embed in customers’ memory to impact their choices. Meanwhile, sound mark can spread by broadcasting station and audio in shops, saving enterprise costs, and because its feature, it also can be generalized in the disabled. In 1st May, 2014, China implemented trademark law, in which defined sound mark, and bring non-visual trademark into the protection scope of trademark law. The introduction of sound trademark content, meeting the standard of TRIPS treaty, is conducive to China’s trademark system in line with international system. In my thesis, there are four parts:The first part defines the basic concept of sound mark. According to the degree of public recognition, trademarks can be divided into fanciful marks, suggestive marks and descriptive marks. And from the nature of sounds trademarks can also be divided into music sound marks and non-music sound marks. And introduce several characteristics of sound mark, which can be recognized by hearing, contains the time elements, and is difficult to establish trademark distinctiveness and easy to spread.The second part analyzes the substantial condition and formal conditions needs of China sound mark acquisition process, through a comparative research of sound mark registration system in every country. Focuses on the positive part—judging method of sound mark significant and negative elements in the limited registration system. And put forward creative suggestions for the retrieval model of sound mark.The third part is mainly based on the basic theory, mentioned in previous content, and figure out the issues, which appear in the practice of trademark infringement cases. A detailed analysis of the counterfeit, fake sound mark behavior and infringe well-known trademark behavior, is described in this part, which is given with plans which contains high-tech equipment means for determining similar trademarks by sound professionals, and questionnaires for judging the sound mark confusion issues. In this part, a theoretical introduction of the conflict of sound mark right and music copyright, and the advantages and disadvantages of the using of prior right mode, and the balance of interests in solving conflict are also discussed carefully.The fourth part further analyzes the compensation in the trademark infringement behavior case. To investigate how the current trademark law supplements the traditional compensatory system, enhancing crackdown of the trademark law on tort, and promoting the current situation of low-cost illegal infringer and high-cost rights protection. It is suggested that in our judicial practice, the type of compensation can be determined according to the degree of fault and whether the prisoner is malicious. Depend on the degree of tort, solving difficult of figuring out the trademark infringement compensation, in order to better protection the legitimate rights.