Various Categories of Trade Marks

Abstract

Goods marks do not require much comment here. These are the trade marks with which the BMW is exclusively concerned, as will be apparent from the official designation ‘Benelux Treaty on Goods Marks’ and ‘Uniform Benelux Law on Goods Marks’. The definition in Article 1 BMW immediately makes clear what it is dealing with ‘... signs which serve to distinguish the goods of a company’. All the comments which this book makes on the BMW thus automatically have reference only to goods marks. But however important these may be in commercial traffic, they certainly do not form the only category of trade marks. One group which is very important in practice is that of the service marks. These differ from goods marks in that they do not serve to distinguish the goods of a company but its services. Many companies are occupied not with the manufacture and/or sale of goods, but with the provision of services. A good example of this is an airline: this transports passengers or freight from one place to another, and in so doing provides a service to the passengers or to the sender of the freight. Another example is a hotel: this makes rooms available for its guests with all the ancillary facilities; this also is not the supply of a product, but again the provision of a service. Numerous other types of business are equally involved in the provision of services; one can suggest here banks, insurance companies, laundries, building contractors, restaurants and camping-sites, but the reader will have no difficulty in completing this list with other examples. Why does the BMW not provide for the possibility of depositing service marks? When this law was drawn up there was indeed a preoccupation with whether service marks should be regulated in the same law, but the legislator recoiled from the idea because service marks had been considered as being mostly of very limited territorial importance; also difficulties could result from the deposit of many practically identical service marks, each only for a small area; and the legislator was moreover probably not sufficiently convinced of the economic significance of service marks in everyday life. If there were exclusively hairdressers, masseurs, café owners and such small scale companies and concerns providing services then indeed the necessity for the deposit of service marks could rightly be doubted. But service provision does not merely play a part in the sphere of craftsmen: more and more service companies are spreading their activities over the whole Benelux area or a considerable part of it and these are far from being only transport companies which, on account of their activities and the very nature of their business, are not bound to one place. These days banks particularly have one or more branches in almost every location, but hotels and restaurants also often have establishments in different places, while tour-operators and travel agencies frequently have outlets in a number of towns.