engleski

Means of protection of trade mark in Macedonia

The era of market economy has brought a mass production and aggressive advertisement which leads to establishment of brands which are recognizable and influential. However, the counterfeit of goods, as an emerging phenomenon, has become a great challenge to the trademark owners which are facing enormous financial losses and distortion of reputation. Nowadays, in Republic of Macedonia it is very frequent to detect lot of counterfeited goods on the local markets and in the shops. Also, the newspapers are overloaded with information concerning recent detection of counterfeited goods. This leads to the logical statement that Macedonia is still a fruitful soil for producing and trading with counterfeiting goods. Consequently, the question arises: what are the means of protection of a trademark as part of an intellectual property, and are they in accordance with the international standards. Therefore, this thesis will look at the existent substantive trademark legislation and will assess the quality of the norms, in comparison to EU and respective countries. The next slot of analysis will be devoted to institutional framework of trademark protection as a valid indicator which demonstrates the efficiency of implementation of the substantial norms. In addition, this paper shell employ statistical data analyses concerning the number of trademark application and registration before State Office of Industrial Property of Macedonia, in order to assess the level of awareness of Macedonian companies for the importance of trademark. Moreover, the thesis will provide an evaluation of the percentage of counterfeited goods, destroyed counterfeited goods, and also the work of relevant institutions in Macedonia. The resulting conclusions of this research will demonstrate that Macedonia has a modern trademark legislation which is mostly in line with the EU standards. However, some improvement has yet to be done in the regulating and giving force to non-traditional trademarks. With regards to the institutional framework, Macedonia has a good basis for structuring a solid institutional support, nonetheless the collaboration between institutions in detecting and implementing the material norms ; should be improved. The judicial system should be more coherent and effective. A highly recommended improvement would be the establishment of a specialized court for trademarks and also a consideration of an alternative dispute resolution.

trademark, intellectual property protection

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