Legal Protection against Unregistered Marks and Unfair Competition Practices (Comparative Study of Indonesia and the United States)

Business competition cannot be avoided any more if you decide to be involved in the business sector. However, business competition is only sometimes carried out automatically, fair and healthy. There are still many business actors who compete unfairly by justifying any means to be able to maintain their business. One is for brands prone to piracy, which are identification marks of a product/service. Therefore, legal protection of brands needs to be done to obtain legal certainty. The research method used in this paper is normative legal research, which is carried out by studying literature using secondary data to solve existing problems. In Indonesia, legal protection for marks can obtain legal certainty if they are successfully registered with the Director General of Intellectual Property Rights (HKI) using the first-to-file principle regulated in the Law on Trademarks and Geographical Indications. It differs slightly from the US trademark protection system, which uses the principle of use in commerce and requires the trademark owner to register the trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under the Lanham Act.