Page 18 - Nine Yards Magazine 2021/2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

get set trademarks
Making sure
what’s yours
stays yours
Trademarking might sound like it’s only for the big guys, but it’s not. A trademark is your property and protects your business.
Neesa Moodley is a seasoned freelance business and finance writer whose writing has appeared in print and online in Daily Maverick, Moneyweb, TechCentral and Business Day.
Every now and then a story crops up in the media of a small business that had to take on a bigger company that might have ‘copied’ its branding, product name or design. Cases like Nature’s Gold and Food Lover’s Market, and Ubuntu Baba and Woolworths come to mind.
Last year, it was Muammer Kasu, the owner of Rack ’n Grill food truck and RocoMamas. The question was who had the legal right to the term ‘smashburger’.
When he started using the term around 2015, registering
a trademark was not top of Muammer’s mind. But not paying more attention to it, caught him on the back foot when fast-food chain RocoMamas issued him with a legal letter, warning him that it was the registered proprietor of the term ‘smashburger’. Muammer was ordered to remove it from his menu and marketing and advertising material within 48 hours.
South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) indicates that widely known words that refer to a type of product, for example, cheese, tomato or onion cannot be trademarked. Because the word ‘smash’ refers to a cooking method, Muammer believes that RocoMamas was incorrectly awarded the trademark.
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14 2021/2022