Intellectual property

The name your customers know you by is usually the most valuable asset you own and the easiest one to lose. Registration comes first, but it is not the whole job: the classes have to be chosen well, the list of goods and services drafted carefully, and the registration sustained over time.

The most frequently missed obligation: between the fifth and sixth year from grant, a mid-term declaration of use must be filed. The window opens once the fifth year is complete and closes at the end of the sixth. If it is not filed, the mark is presumed unused and becomes exposed to a cancellation action by a third party.

• Clearance search before filing
• Application before the INPI
• Mid-term declaration of use
• Renewals and assignments
• Oppositions, filed and answered
• Watch service on the Trademark Bulletin (Boletín de Marcas)
• Transfers and licence agreements
• Cancellation and invalidity actions

If you solved a technical problem in a new way, you have something patentable. A patent requires novelty, inventive step and industrial application; a utility model, a title that has no counterpart in US law and which protects a new form of a known tool or device, requires only novelty and industrial application. Neither term can be extended.

Two deadlines that sink applications: disclosing the invention before filing can cost you novelty, and the substantive examination fee falls due at eighteen months for a patent and at three months for a utility model. If it is not paid, the application is deemed abandoned.

• Preliminary patentability assessment
• Drafting of the specification and claims
• Filing and prosecution before the INPI
• Timely request for substantive examination
• Responses to office actions
• Conversion between patent and utility model
• Prior non-disclosure agreements
• Paris Convention priority for foreign filings

Under Argentine law this route protects appearance, not function. It covers both three-dimensional features — the silhouette of a container, the line of a piece of furniture — and two-dimensional ones, such as the print on a fabric. There is no equivalent of the US design patent: in Argentina this is a registration, not a patent. It is the fastest and cheapest of the three registrations, and the one most often overlooked. Whatever is dictated by the function of the product falls outside this route, and so does a mere change of colour to something already known.

The advantage almost nobody uses: a single application may cover up to twenty models or designs within the same class, at a lower fee than filing them separately. For a product line, the difference in cost is substantial.

• Single or multiple applications
• Classification under the Locarno Agreement
• Preparation of the graphic reproductions
• Renewals for two further five-year terms
• Filing after trade fairs and exhibitions
• Enforcement against copies and imitations

A work is protected from the moment it exists, with no need to register it. Registration serves to prove when and by whom, which is precisely what gets disputed when a conflict arises. Before the Argentine National Copyright Office there are two distinct routes: registration of a published work, and deposit in custody of an unpublished work, submitted in a sealed envelope. Software has its own procedure within each, and the Office also records contracts, pen names and periodicals.

What almost nobody knows: the deposit of an unpublished work protects for three years and must be renewed within thirty days after expiry. If it is not renewed, the Office destroys the deposited work, under Decree 972/2024. Software left in a sealed envelope and forgotten stops working as evidence.

• Registration of published works
• Deposit in custody of unpublished works
• Software deposit and renewal
• Recordal of contracts before the Office
• Assignment and publishing agreements
• Commissioned and collective works
• Claims for unauthorised use
• Takedown notices on platforms

A registration is worth little if the contract gives away what the registration protects. I review and draft the agreements where intellectual property changes hands, is licensed or is shared, and I handle the domain name, which is almost always left in the name of whoever built the site rather than the company.

More rights are lost in contracts than in registries. If you commissioned a logo, a website or a development and no assignment was signed, ownership may not be yours no matter that you paid the invoice.

• Trademark licence agreements
• Assignments and commissioned work
• Non-disclosure agreements
• Software development agreements
• Domain registration before NIC Argentina
• Recovery of hijacked domains