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There are probably more than 200 start ups in the edible insect market. Most are quite small and do their best with the resources they have, facing a new market and a legislative grey area that add risks on top of more risks. Well, Bugsolutely is no different at all.

Still, we decided to spend some money on protecting our brand (Bugsolutely) and especially our product name (Cricket Pasta™) by registering the trademark in some countries. Our experience may be helpful for others, and what follows is a quick summary of what we have done.

US trademarkWORLD (almost). A long list of countries has signed the Wipo (World Intellectual property Organization) agreement, also called The Madrid System. The Madrid System is a one stop service for registering tramarks in 97 countries.  File one application, in one language, and pay one set of fees to protect your trademark in those nations.  You can see the fees here, which depend on the number of countries you want to cover. The more coverage you want, the more expensive it can get.

US. The website is well organized, and the procedure is available on line. We chose to get support from one of the many agencies providing the registrations service, in order to save time (they already know the process), and the cost is minimal (70 USD). What you pay to the US government agency for the registration itself is less than 300 USD. The process takes about three months, but in theory nobody would be allowed to register after your application is filed. The status of the application can be checked online at any time. The protection will cover both the brand name AND the graphic representation (logo).

EUROPEAN UNION. The EU has a good website and online services, too, just more expensive. OK, considering the number of states covered, it is not that expensive: the Community Trade Mark (CTM) grants you exclusive rights in all current and future Member States of the European Union through a single registration. The application costs around 900 Euro (980 USD). The protection will cover both the brand name AND the graphic representation (logo). If you are interested in only one or just a few EU countries, you can decide to apply to each country trademark office, and rule the EU Community Trademark out. You save the 900 Euro, but then averagely you pay 200 to 300 Euro per country, and sometimes the procedure is complicated and time consuming. Forget Italy, you cannot do it online and it is a horrible journey into bureaucracy. Germany can be done online, but you may need to use an automatic translator to read some parts.

THAILAND. Clearly, majority of you are not interested in a small (for Asian standards) and remote (for western standards) country, but it is the Motherland – both for our company, as well as for edible insects. Here, it’s actually, far cheaper than anything mentioned above! 14 USD for the application. The website of the Thai Department of Intellectual Property is available also in English, but unfortunately the online registration does not seem to work (and did not work one year ago, either) and it is also not very user-friendly, to say the least. The office is far from the center of Bangkok, you may need to go there with two witnesses (sic!) as well as a whole lot of patience. But, well, it is 14 US dollars!

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