A trademark doesn’t defend itself. In a nonuse dispute before IMPI (Mexican Institute of Industrial Property), you have to prove how you use your mark and how long you’ve been using it.
That is what “proof of use” means: evidence showing that your mark is genuinely on the market.
When do you need it?
- In the mandatory declaration of use, due within the three months after the third anniversary of your registration, you state that you use the mark. You don’t attach evidence, but the use you declare has to be real.
- In a renewal, where you also state that the mark is in use.
- In a dispute: when someone asks for the cancellation of your trademark, claiming you don’t use it.
In every case, your evidence is only as good as your ability to show it existed on a verifiable date, before the day you needed it.
What counts as evidence
Anything that shows the mark in real commercial use:
- Invoices and receipts that show the mark.
- Packaging, labels and advertising.
- Dated posts on your website and social media.
- Photos of the product or the point of sale.
The weak spot of any evidence is the date: a screenshot or a photo can be altered. That’s why it pays to timestamp it with a verifiable date.
Certified timestamps: evidence with a verifiable date
Every week, Prueba de Uso publishes your mark in a new edition of its catalog, computes a digital fingerprint of that edition (SHA-256) and seals it with a certified timestamp under the RFC 3161 standard. From then on, anyone can check that the edition existed on that exact date and hasn’t been changed since.
And because the timestamp sits in a catalog anyone can open, you don’t have to take our word for it: anyone can check it on their own.