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In the 1990s CMC Ltd. expressed its inability to successfully complete this task, and tenders were invited from private companies to complete what CMC had started. TCS bid, among others, and was awarded the contract. In 2001, TCS also expressed its inability to complete the project, and the project was transferred to NIC which is currently in charge of computerisation at the Registry.
All this has led to a complete messing-up of the records which the Registry is under statutory obligation to maintain. Today there is no Register of Trade Marks open to inspection to the general public. No record of the Indexes of Trade Marks, Owners of Trade Marks or Registered Users of Trade Marks is available, which records too the Registrar of Trade Marks is under statutory obligation to maintain.
An official search report, which is expected to be accurate in disclosing whether the adoption of a particular name as a trade mark will be legally protectable, does not, in some cases, contain even identical registered trade marks.
Relying on an incomplete search report, even if it has the official stamp on it, to assist in the adoption of a new trade mark can prove to be an expensive mistake. Just because the official report does not disclose a registered trade mark which is, in some cases, identical to the mark which you propose to adopt, does not mean that the earlier registered trade mark does not exist and that the proprietor of that mark does not have the right to stop you from using your mark, at any time in the future, that he gets to know of the existence of your mark.
At PiggyBank we built our own database of registered and advertised pending applications from the official Trade Marks Journals published by the Trade Marks Registry. We today have a more comprehensive database of registered and advertised trade marks that anybody else. We have also developed in-house a search programme specially suited for the specialised task of trade mark searching. This programme can identify phonetic similarity in words such as "quality", and "kwality", or different spellings for identical sounding words such as "lakshmi" and "laxmi" or "luxmi" etc.
PiggyBank Data Services came into existence in 1985 and has been conducting reliable and accurate trade mark searches since 1992. We guarantee that it a trade mark was advertised and is registered it is in our database and that if a trade mark is in our database it shall not have been missed in our search report.
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