1) Provide a letter of consent if/when asked. Generally, people apply for removal if your registration is cited against their application. A letter of consent will overcome the citation, so they won’t need to remove your registration.
2) File a fresh application for marks that are temporarily unused. If that fresh application presents a second obstacle to acceptance/registration of a later application, then the applicant for that later application may not bother to apply for removal of your registration (there is no point since, even if they were successful in achieving removal of your registration, your fresh application would still block them).
3) Ensure all marks are in use is prior to alleging infringement or engaging in a dispute, as otherwise the other party might apply for removal of your registration to gain leverage in the dispute.
4) Keep the owner details current. If a trade mark is assigned from one company (the assignor) to another, and then the assignor is deregistered, it is really important to record the assignment with IP Australia so people don’t get the impression that the trade mark use ceased upon the deregistration of the assignor.
5) Voluntarily delete goods/services that you no longer use and have no intention to use in the near future. While partial applications for removal are possible, someone may apply for removal of the registration for all of the goods/services, since they are applying for removal of some of them.
6) Exert actual control over licensees. If you use the marks via licence, then the use by the licensee accrues back to you, but…only in cases where you exert actual control (quality and financial) over the use. It is not enough that the licence agreement gives you the theoretical right to do this.
7) Use the trade mark in the same way it is registered, and keep a record of the use or reasons for non-use. Offer the goods/services for sale in Australia (use AUD as a currency on your website and offer shipping to Australia). Keep a record of all Australian visitors to your website, and all sales in AUD, and goods purchased by a buyer in Australia and/or shipped to Australia. If there are any major obstacles that prevent use in Australia (such as war increasing the cost of shipping exponentially) then keep a record of that too. Non-use actions are subject to the registrar’s discretion, so reasonable explanations for non-use may be enough to fend against a removal application.
