In previous publications, we have informed our readers that a registered trademark in Mexico may lose its validity based on nullity or expirationprocedures, and other causes listed in the law. In addition to losing a trademark registration based on nullity and expiration, a trademark owner may loserights if the mark is “cancelled” in accordance with Mexican intellectual property law. Article 153 of the Intellectual Property Law (Ley de la PropiedadIndustrial) provides that “A trademark registration will be cancelled if its owner has caused or tolerated the mark to become transformed into a genericname corresponding to one or other product or services covered by its registration, so that, in the commercial and generalized public usage of the mark,the mark loses its distinctive character and is no longer a means of distinguishing the product or service to which it applies.” In the marketplace, varioustrademarks exist which, because of the form in which they were disseminated by their owners, continue to be confused with the technical name that mustbe applied to their product, and in this manner cause the mark to be converted into a generic name, thus leading to its cancellation. For this reason, it isalmost always advisable for a trademark owner to designate its mark with the proper registration sign “®”, and at the same time, disseminate in a distinctmanner the technical name of the product in question. In this way, a trademark owner can avoid having its trademark converted into a generic term,unless it can be shown that the trademark owner “deliberately” allowed the mark to be converted to generic use.
