The Legal Problems In Trademark Evaluation

In people’s daily life, trademarks are everywhere and they are one way to distinguish different products or services. Compared to an ordinary trademark, a well-known trademark with distinctive features and good reputation can stimulate consumers to buy the product or the service. As one kind of intangible assets, people are paying more attention to the inner value of trademarks, because trademarks can bring greater economic benefits to their owners and enhance the competitiveness of the whole enterprise. Nowadays, trademarks are involved in a greater proportion of economic activities. In order to guarantee the safety of trades and the fairness of competition, trademark evaluation should be put in a more important place. This can also be a helpful resolution to the argument on trademark value. In the field of law, the core of trademark evaluation is to analyze how the inner features and some value-affecting factors impact the value of trademarks.At present, there already exists some research on trademark evaluation, but not enough from the legal aspect. The existing analysis just simply treats trademarks as intangible assets, and ignoring the specialty of trademark as an intellectual property asset. The legal features and the extent of trademark have a big influence on the reasonableness and effectiveness of trademark evaluation. Besides, the supervision and self-discipline of trademark evaluation industry need to be sound gradually. This essay is thus based on the prior research, and emphasize on analyzing the purpose, affecting factors, methods and trademark features in trademark evaluation. The ultimate purpose is to ensure the accuracy of evaluation results. What’s more, the author point out some existing problems in the trademark evaluation practice and propounds some corresponding recommendations.This essay includes six parts. The first part is the general introduction of this topic, includes the reason to write this essay and the research results of other researchers. The second part introduces the concept of trademark and trademark evaluation, including the differences between the evaluation of trademark and other intellectual properties and the introduction of personnel and target in trademark evaluation. The third part is about the circumstances of trademark evaluation and the methods and process to follow. In this part, a chart is given to show the procedure of trademark evaluation. And the three common methods are analyzed to specify the circumstances each one of them should be used. The forth part analyzes the factors affecting the value of trademark. These factors can be divided into legal factors and illegal ones. How and to what extent these factors may show their impact can be seen in this part. And the last part summarizes the major existing problems within the evaluation process of trademark and then gives some corresponding recommendations.