A trademark is not bought. It's leased — in ten-year terms, renewable for as long as the brand lives. Hold that single fact in your head and everything else about renewal, assignment, and lapse falls into place.

Most owners learn this the expensive way: a notice, a missed date, a mark suddenly showing "removed" on the register. The tenth anniversary has a habit of arriving while you're busy running the business the mark was supposed to protect.

The ten-year rhythm

Registration lasts ten years from the application date — not the grant date, the application date. That distinction matters more than people expect, because examination backlogs mean the certificate often arrives years after the clock started. Renewal is done on Form TM-R, and the sensible move is to file it as the tenth year approaches rather than on the anniversary itself. The government fee mirrors the filing slabs: ₹4,500 per class for individuals, startups, and small enterprises; ₹9,000 per class for everyone else, at e-filing rates.

Put the date in two calendars. The Registrar does send reminders, but "the notice went to spam" has never been a successful legal argument.

The six-month grace period

Miss the date and the law gives you a corridor, not a cliff. Section 25 of the Trade Marks Act lets you renew within six months after expiry on payment of a surcharge. It's designed for exactly this — the busy founder, the changed email address, the file that sat with the consultant for a quarter.

Use the corridor. The surcharge stings, but it stings far less than losing the mark and starting over — new application, new examination, a fresh four-month opposition window, and a gap in protection you cannot backfill.

If you let it lapse entirely

Past the six months, the Registrar removes the mark from the register. Two things matter then, and the second one surprises most people.

First: you get one more year. Within a year of removal, you can apply for restoration of the mark. The door is closing, but it isn't shut.

Second: for that same year, your removed mark is still treated as a registered mark for the purpose of blocking other people's applications. The law gives your ghost a year to haunt the register. Someone filing an identical mark the month after your removal still runs into you. After the year, though, the name is genuinely free — and in a crowded register, good names don't stay free for long.

This is why "I'll just re-file later" is a gamble, not a plan. Later might belong to someone else.

Selling the brand: assignment

Brands get sold — with the business, or on their own. A D2C label gets acquired. A founder exits and the buyer wants the name. An assignment transfers ownership of the mark, and it's recorded with the Registry on Form TM-P.

Record it. This is the part people skip, and it matters more than the sale deed itself. An unrecorded assignment is a private handshake the register doesn't know about. When you enforce the mark — send the cease-and-desist, file the infringement suit — the first question is always whether the register shows you as the owner. If it still shows the seller, your enforcement starts with an embarrassing explanation.

One commercial detail to get right in the paperwork: assignment can be with or without the goodwill of the business. Selling the brand but keeping the business (or vice versa) is perfectly legal, but the agreement must say which one it is. Ambiguity here has ended friendships and started lawsuits.

Sharing without selling: licensing

You don't have to sell to share. Franchises, distribution deals, manufacturing tie-ups — all of these are licences: someone else uses your mark while you keep owning it. Indian law handles this through the "registered user" mechanism in Section 49, where the arrangement is recorded with the Registry.

The mechanism has one substantive requirement, and it's the important one: you must exercise quality control over the licensee's goods or services. This isn't bureaucratic decoration. It's the legal reason a licensed mark stays yours — the mark keeps meaning "this meets my standards." A licence with no quality control starts to look like abandonment, and abandonment is how marks die.

Write the quality standards into the agreement. Inspect. Enforce. The paperwork should read like you mean it, because the law will read it exactly as written.

Knowing when to let go

Not every mark deserves renewal, and saying so is part of honest advice. The product line died. The company pivoted two years ago. The name embarrasses you now. Ten more years of renewal fees, watch services, and enforcement vigilance for a mark you'll never use again is nostalgia with a price tag.

Let it lapse deliberately. Put the money into the mark that actually carries the business forward. Portfolio hygiene — owning what you use, releasing what you don't — is what separates serious brand owners from collectors.

Ten-year dates are easy to miss and expensive to fix late. Renewals, assignments, licences — our team handles the full trademark lifecycle, and we keep the calendar so you don't have to (our compliance calendar tracks the dates that matter). Hand us the dates; get back to building the brand.