You’ve spent years building your brand. You’ve invested in positioning it, making it recognizable, and giving it real value. Then you decide to expand into a new country—only to discover that someone else has already registered your brand name there.
They have no connection to your business. They haven’t operated under that brand. Yet they hold a right you don’t: legal ownership through registration.
This is not an isolated case. It is a widespread practice known as trademark squatting.
This is what happened to Arturo’s, a Venezuelan restaurant chain founded in 1986. With dozens of establishments and international presence, the company discovered that in 2020 a third party had registered its trademark in Spain for restaurant services.
Without real activity, without any link to the original business, but with a legal position that allowed them to block its entry into the market.
In most trademark systems, the right is not granted to the one who first uses the trademark worldwide, but to the one who first registers it in a specific territory.
This means that, if a company has not protected its trademark in a country, a third party can move ahead and acquire formal rights over it.
From that point on, the room for action changes. The holder of the registration can prevent the use of the trademark or condition its transfer.
In Arturo’s case, the applicant offered to sell the registration for €10,000, later increasing the amount to €28,000 without clear justification. That conduct would ultimately be key to proving bad faith.
In May 2025, the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) declared the registration null due to bad faith, under Article 51.1(b) of the Spanish Trademark Act.
The decision was based on several elements: the absence of real use of the trademark by the applicant, the identity between the signs, the coincidence in the services and, especially, the offer to sell the registration.
The company that owned the original trademark managed to recover its name, but the process was not without costs.
It was necessary to provide evidence, prove the notoriety of the sign and sustain an administrative procedure that lasted over time.
The question is inevitable: what would have happened if the trademark had been registered before entering Spain?
The answer is simple: the conflict would not have existed.
Prevention remains the most effective tool. Some basic measures can significantly reduce this risk:
A trademark is not just a commercial asset. It is also a right.
And, as this case shows, that right often depends on who gets to registration first, not on who built it.
If you have doubts about how to register your trademark or protect it in other countries, at Lawwwing we support you throughout the entire process.
