intellectual property

Internationally recognized
IP department

Paz Horowitz has consistently received international recognition as a leading IP firm. You can visit, for example, Law Business Research and Euromoney publications.

All honors belong to the creative and detail-obsessed IP litigation and prosecution teams at Paz Horowitz, and to our trademark clients around the world who keep us on our toes.

IP prosecution and enforcement services

Trademarks and trade names
Database and market searches
Patents
New plant varieties
Copyrights (including software)
Domain names
Sanitary registrations
IP due diligence
Licenses
IP valuation
Anti-piracy and border measures
Publicity and advertising

Paz Horowitz registration highlights

The world's first texture mark (The Bottle Surface Texture® of OLD PARR)
The first sound mark in South America (The INTEL spiral sound®)
The first electronic US trademark application from Ecuador
The first Ecuadorian Denomination of Origin, MONTECRISTI, for Panama Hats from the Montecristi region of Ecuador

IP litigation highlights

We provide cutting-edge litigation service. Brief examples include:

Trademarks: In a case in which an applicant had copied our client’s unregistered and non-famous football helmet design, we successfully opposed the application that also included the words, “In God We Trust”. The Ecuadorian Trademark Office agreed with our argument that “In God We Trust” is an official Ecuadorian symbol, since the U.S. Dollar is the official currency of Ecuador.
Border Measures: We have stopped the entry at the border of both large cargos and even suitcases of counterfeit goods.
Unjust Competition Law: according the IP Office, we were the first to use the Unjust Competition section of the IP Law to protect unregistered and un-registrable intellectual property against a copycat competitor.
Patent Law: In litigation, we corrected an official misinterpretation of Ecuadorian Patent law that lead to a major change in the calculation of time for the filing of Patent Oppositions.
Trade Names: we showed that appropriate prior use of Trade Names in one Andean Community country has a higher right to protection than a later independent use of the same Trade Name in a second Andean Community country. In this case, our foreign client was able to stop the use and cancel the junior user’s corporate name, even though the junior user was the first to use the Trade Name in Ecuador.

Publications

Members of our IP Area have authored books and articles in: the Ecuador chapter of Intellectual Property in the Global Market Place (Wiley); the Ecuador chapter in Trademark Practice & Forms (Oceana); the Ecuador chapter in World Trademark Law Yearbooks for 2006 and 2007; World Trademark Law Report; and Marcasur magazine.