Misuse of a sticker?

Misuse of a sticker?

"My neighbour has put the logo of a security company on his front door to make thieves think his house is protected. Does he have the right to do this even though he's not a customer of the company?"

Virginie, Geneva

As more and more private individuals turn to private security companies to protect their homes, the number of such agencies is increasing in Switzerland. Their business name must be entered in the Commercial Register. Once this has been done, the company has the exclusive right to use its trade name to designate its own business. However, this protection is limited solely to the company name, excluding graphic elements such as logos and colours.

In order to extend this protection to the logo and to the whole of Switzerland, the owner of the company may protect his business name as a trademark, i.e. according to the legal definition, as a sign capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one company from those of other companies, such as letters or numbers, alone or in combination. To this end, the trade name must not include terms in the public domain, must not be misleading and must not be contrary to law. It should be noted that the goods or services to which the trademark refers must be designated in the application for registration filed with the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. Once this has been done, and provided that the proprietor uses the trademark no later than 5 years after filing, the trademark is protected for a period of 10 years, renewable indefinitely. This means that the owner has an absolute right to use it in the same way as any other privately-owned asset.

If it has protected itself in this way, the security company you are referring to could demand that your neighbour remove the sticker from his front door, if necessary by taking legal action. It could also, in theory, file a criminal complaint for trademark infringement (the penalty could be a fine or a custodial sentence of up to one year) or invoke the civil protection of its name under trademark law or the law of obligations in order to claim compensation. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these companies also distribute their stickers for advertising purposes, and checking that they are actually being used is probably a tedious task, if not counterproductive, given that visibility contributes to the effectiveness of the deterrent measures proposed by the security agencies.