Now Companies are opening up to get their Jingles and Chimes registered as Sound Trade Marks

March,27,2017:

Even National Stock Exchange's theme song is registered as a sound mark in India?

Trade Mark Rules, 2017, which were notified recently, have revised procedures and made it easier for the companies to file applications for registration of the sound marks, by appending an MP3 file in application.

Over the years, there have been only a handful of registrations of the sound marks in India -the first being the `Yahoo Yodel' of Yahoo Inc, which was applied in 2004 for registration of sound of a human voice yodelling the word `Ya hoo'.

For a sound mark to be registered, applicant needs to prove factual distinctiveness of sound -in other words, there must be a recall of sound with product or service.

Sounds can be a corporate jingle (ICICI Bank) or sound heard upon logging into a device (Nokia).Traditionally , companies registered words, names, labels, acronyms, signatures with trademark registry .Procedural challenges  had deterred many companies from registering their sound marks.

“Prior to notification of the revised rules on March 6, an application for registration of a sound mark required the applicant to submit its graphical representation, viz: musical notations and written description.

This small but crucial change in application procedures could see a renewed interest in registration of the sound marks.

With inputs from TOI.