Non-Traditional Trademarks
This chapter provides a twenty-year retrospective on non-traditional trademarks, using the European Union, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and Australia as case studies. It presents findings from an empirical study on the application and registration of non-traditional marks in these jurisdictions from 1996 to present day. It assesses whether the appetite for non-traditional marks differs across jurisdictions and what impact, if any, differing regulatory regimes have on filing and registration activity. The study also canvasses the micro-trends emerging from these data in order to test prevailing assumptions about non-traditional marks. The policy implications of these findings will also be touched upon and contextualized against growing concerns about trademark depletion, which have to date focused on the diminishing number of available words and colors as trademarks, but may well extend to non-traditional marks more generally.