Full Marks for IIZUKA and KOZO

IIZUKA and KOZO are now registered at the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market with the following Community Trade Mark numbers in classes 9,16 and 42:

003209665 - IIZUKA
003238193 - KOZO

The Community Trade mark means we are protected in all the EU countries.

The process began in September 2004 when it was decided to trade mark the company's name IIZUKA. As you may guess IIZUKA is of Japanese origin. It attracted some of the company founders a few years ago as the name of a village in a Japanese computer game. Very loosely translated it means 'mighty mountain' which is better than the literal translation of 'small mound'. IIZUKA is best.

Having started the ball rolling with our company name we decided to also register a generic name for our technology. Initially we wanted to use Axiom but you may realise there are lots of uses of Axiom. We had the pleasure of working with Dr Ruth French of Cruikshank and Fairweather in Glasgow (now Marks and Clerk) who was insistent that we found another name before wasting our time on Axiom.

The Japanese vocabulary is a good source of trade mark names when finding an English word that hasn't been used a hundred times is a problem. Have a look at the Patent Office web site and play with the search engine to understand the point.

Eventually KOZO materialised, again from the Japanese dictionary meaning 'Big Concept' and in January 2005 the registration process began. Not surprisingly in the search process there emerged a Japanese company with KOZO in the firm's title. KOZO KEIKAKU ENGINEERING Inc in Tokyo were very helpful in establishing that this was not a barrier.

Obtaining a registered trade mark takes about 18 months with several steps en route. For more information go to the Mark and Clerk web site

Or the Patent Office .