Registering the Mark — The Nigerian Trade Marks Registry in Practice

Two certificates, framed in two offices in Lagos. Both are genuine. Both were obtained by competent agents who did what they were asked. Both proprietors describe themselves, accurately, as having registered their trademarks.

The first belongs to a woman selling a hair oil. Her agent filed in the class covering cosmetics and hair lotions, and specified the goods as hair oils and hair creams. Four years later she has extended into a scalp supplement taken by mouth, a shampoo bar, and a small line of branded combs, and she is selling all of it through a shop and a website under the same name. A competitor begins selling a supplement under a near-identical name. She reaches for her certificate and discovers that it covers hair oils and hair creams.

The second belongs to a man selling packaged spices. His agent filed the word alone, in plain block letters, in the class covering spices — and then, at a cost that felt disproportionate at the time, filed again in the class covering retail services, and again in the class covering the sauces he had mentioned he might one day make. When a copyist appeared, the certificate reached him.

The difference was not diligence, or money, or the quality of the agent. It was a conversation about the next five years that one of them had and the other did not.

This essay is placed fourth in its cluster deliberately, because procedure is the least interesting thing in this subject and almost every other treatment of it leads with the forms. The forms matter and are set out below. But the decision that determines whether a registration is useful is taken before any form is completed, and it is barely discussed anywhere.

Two matters this essay does not reopen. Whether registration is the right register at all — as against the Corporate Affairs Commission, a domain registrar or a platform handle — was settled in the ownership essay, and the short answer is that only one of the four is ownership. And the covenant restraining a manufacturer from filing your mark belongs to the agreement, where it sits in the grant clause.

Registration in Nigeria is governed by the Trade Marks Act, Cap T13, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, administered by the Registrar of Trade Marks at the Trademarks, Patents and Designs Registry under the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. The statute follows the older United Kingdom model, and this cluster's essay on licensing makes the same point about a neighbouring provision: England moved to a lighter regime in 1994, Nigeria did not, and English commentary written since is very often describing a statute Nigeria never adopted.

What the certificate grants is narrower than the phrase my trademark suggests, and it is bounded on three sides.

The mark as filed. The monopoly attaches to what was submitted. A word filed in plain characters covers the word however it is styled, which is generally the strongest filing for a name. A stylised logo filed as a device covers that device, and a competitor using the same word in different styling is further from it than the proprietor expects. Sellers frequently file the pretty version and leave the word itself unregistered.

The goods or services specified. This is the wall that catches almost everyone and it is the subject of Act Three.

Nigeria. Trademark rights are territorial. A Nigerian registration does nothing in Ghana, and a competitor manufacturing in Nigeria for export sits in a position the certificate was never built to address.

There is a further and genuinely unsettled question about international filing. Nigeria acceded to the Madrid Protocol, which allows a single international application to designate multiple countries, but whether a Madrid designation produces an enforceable right in Nigeria in the absence of implementing domestic legislation has been contested, and practitioners have not treated the position as settled. A seller with real ambitions outside Nigeria should treat national filings in target markets as the reliable route and should ask specifically about the Madrid position rather than assuming it works as it does elsewhere.

A trademark is not a right in a name. It is a right in a name, for certain things, here.

What follows describes how the process is structured rather than how long any stage takes or what it costs, both of which move and neither of which an essay should pretend to fix. Timelines at the registry have varied considerably; a seller should plan on the basis that this is measured in years rather than months, and that the useful date arrives at the beginning rather than the end.

Goods and services are sorted into forty-five classes under the Nice Classification, an international scheme most trademark systems use: classes one to thirty-four for goods, thirty-five to forty-five for services. Nigeria applies it, and Nigeria requires a separate application for each class. There is no single multi-class application, which means every additional class is an additional filing with its own cost — and it is that structure, more than any advice, which pushes cost-conscious founders into filing in one class only.

Inside the class sits the specification of goods: the actual words describing what is covered. This is the operative text of the whole registration, and it is very often drafted in thirty seconds from a description the client gave on the telephone.

Nobody frames the specification. Everybody frames the certificate. The specification is the part that decides cases.

Four decisions live here.

How wide to draw the specification. Too narrow and the registration fails to reach the adjacent product a copyist chooses; too wide and the registration carries goods the proprietor has never sold, which is an invitation to a non-use attack and a weak point in an opposition. The defensible position is the honest one: what is sold now, plus what is genuinely intended, expressed in the register's own vocabulary rather than the founder's.

Which class the product is actually in. This is less obvious than it sounds and is where the hair-oil proprietor came unstuck. Cosmetics and preparations applied to the body sit in one class; preparations taken into the body for health purposes sit in another. A brand crossing from topical to ingestible has crossed a classification boundary that is invisible on the shelf and decisive on the register. The same trap catches a food brand adding a supplement, a drinks brand adding a powder, and a skincare brand adding a device.

Whether the retail activity needs its own registration. Selling goods under a name and providing retail services under that name are different things in classification terms, and the class covering retail and business services is frequently relevant to a brand that runs its own shop, site or marketplace storefront. For a business whose name appears above a door or across a website as much as on a jar, that filing is doing real work.

Which adjacent class to take early. Filing costs are per class, so the question is not whether to file everywhere — nobody sensible does — but which single additional class most protects the direction of travel. The answer is usually the category the founder describes when asked what she would like to be selling in three years, and asking that question is the entire technique.

Which produces the practical frame this essay exists to supply. For most product brands the useful shape is three: the class of the product sold today, the class of the retail or service activity through which it is sold, and the one adjacent class the business is most likely to enter. A seller who can afford only one should take the first; a seller who can afford two should think hard about which of the remaining two her business actually is.

The certificate is often treated as the end of the ownership question. It is the beginning of a different one.

It does not police itself. No official body monitors the market for infringement. The register grants a right; enforcing it is the proprietor's own act, at the proprietor's own cost, and a right nobody enforces is indistinguishable in practice from a right nobody holds.

It does not defeat an earlier user automatically. Rights arising from reputation and use exist alongside the register, and a business trading under a name before somebody else registered it is not necessarily without recourse. Registration is a powerful position; it is not a universal one.

It does not cover the look of the product. The shape of a bottle, the arrangement of a label, the colour combination that makes a shelf recognisable — these run through other regimes, and a copyist who takes the get-up while avoiding the word may sit entirely outside a word registration. That is a subject of its own, and this cluster takes it up separately.

It does not survive indifference. A registered mark can weaken through non-use and through use by others that the proprietor does not control — a separate essay in this cluster takes the licensing side of that failure on its own. Registration begins an obligation of attention rather than ending it.

Two orderings matter, and both are free.

The first is that the search and the filing come before the name is public — before the packaging is printed, before the handles are taken, and before the manufacturer receives a brief with the name on it. This cluster has now arrived at that proposition from three directions, which is a reasonable indication that it is the single most consequential piece of sequencing in the subject.

The second is what to do during the wait. Since registration takes effect from the filing date, the intervening period is not dead time, and three habits make the eventual right stronger. Use the mark, consistently and in the form filed, because use is what a registration is ultimately protecting. Keep evidence of that use — dated packaging, invoices, advertising, listings — filed somewhere retrievable, because it is the material that answers a non-use challenge and proves reputation in an opposition. And watch for conflicts, in the Journal and in the market.

None of that requires a professional. It requires a folder and the knowledge that the folder will one day be asked for.

The framed certificate on the office wall does something psychological that is worth naming, because it is the reason so many proprietors stop at that point. It converts an anxiety into a document. The founder who worried that somebody might take her name now has an object proving that they cannot, and the anxiety resolves.

But the certificate is not the asset. It is a receipt for the asset, and the asset itself is a line of text specifying goods — a line most proprietors have never read carefully, drafted by somebody working from a brief telephone conversation, at a moment when the business was smaller and simpler than it is now.

This is the same shape the series pillar identified. A brand is not a thing; it is a collection of separate rights that happen to point in the same direction, and each of them is bounded in ways the founder does not perceive because the market does not perceive them. The register's boundary is classification. It is invisible on the shelf, invisible on the website, invisible to the customer, and decisive in the only room where it is ever tested.

Registration is not the answer to the ownership question. It is the answer, in writing, to a narrower question somebody else drafted.

The woman with the hair oil did nothing wrong. She was asked what she sold, she answered accurately, and the specification recorded her answer. What nobody asked her was what she intended to sell — and the certificate, for four years, gave her every reason not to wonder.

This publication is educational and analytical. It describes how legal and commercial structures work; it does not advise on any particular matter, and nothing here should be relied upon as advice on a reader’s own affairs. The author holds commercial interests in the brand-building and private-label sector examined by this series.