Here is an uncomfortable exercise. Take your logo. Now prove you own it.
Not that you paid for it. Not that you have used it for six years. Prove, on paper, that the legal right to that artwork transferred from the designer who drew it to the company that uses it. Most Pakistani businesses cannot, because the transfer never happened in the form the law requires.
This is an audit rather than a guide. Each asset gets the same three questions. Do you own it. Could you prove it. What happens if somebody challenges you. Work through your own business as you read, and expect at least one uncomfortable answer.
The rule underneath everything
Two provisions in Pakistani law explain most ownership failures, and neither is intuitive.
The first owner of a copyright work is the author, not the person who paid. Your designer owns the logo they drew unless something moved it.
An assignment of copyright is invalid unless it is in writing and signed by the assignor. A verbal agreement does not do it. An invoice does not do it. A WhatsApp message saying the files are attached does not do it. The Copyright Ordinance 1962 requires a signed written assignment, and without one the right sits with whoever created the work.
Read those together and the picture is stark. If you commissioned a logo, a website, a packaging design or a product photograph from a freelancer or an agency, and there is no signed assignment in your file, the creator very likely still holds the copyright. You have permission to use it, implied by the transaction. You do not have ownership.
This is fixable, and it is far cheaper to fix while the relationship is good than during a dispute.
Asset 1: Your brand name
Do you own it? Only if it is registered. Pakistan operates a first to file trademark system, so using a name for years does not automatically defeat someone who files it before you.
There is a genuine nuance here that gets flattened in most advice. Pakistan does recognise common law rights built on prior use, enforceable through a passing off action, and well known marks receive protection under the Trade Marks Ordinance even without registration. But relying on either means litigating. Registration means holding a certificate.
Could you prove it? A registration certificate from the Trade Marks Registry proves it in a sentence. Prior use proves it through evidence, argument, and time you would rather spend running the business.
What happens if challenged? Without registration, you defend. With registration, they do.
One trap worth naming. Registering a company at SECP does not give you a trademark. They are different registers under different laws for different purposes. A competitor can register your company name as a trademark in the classes that matter, and the fact that you incorporated first will not settle it. If your business name is also your brand, you need both, and SECP corporate services work should be paired with a trademark filing rather than assumed to cover it.
Asset 2: Your logo and visual identity
Do you own it? Copyright in artistic work sits with whoever drew it until a signed written assignment moves it. The freelancer, the agency, the cousin who was good at Illustrator.
Could you prove it? Open your files and look for a signed assignment. If what you find is an invoice and an email with the final files attached, that is a payment record, not a transfer of rights.
What happens if challenged? Usually nothing dramatic, and that is why it goes unfixed for years. It surfaces at the worst moments. During due diligence when you raise investment. When a designer you parted with badly objects to your continued use. When you try to register the logo as a trademark and cannot cleanly establish your title to it.
The fix is short. Contact whoever created it, put a one page written assignment in front of them, get it signed, and file it. Do that before you need it.
Asset 3: Your website and its code
Copyright in Pakistan covers literary works, and computer programs sit inside that definition. So the same rule applies to code as to artwork.
Do you own it? If an agency built your site, the code is theirs unless assigned. So is the design. So, frequently, are the hosting and domain accounts, which is a separate and more urgent problem.
Could you prove it? Three things to locate: a signed assignment covering the code and design, administrative access to the domain registrar in your company’s name, and repository access.
What happens if challenged? The realistic risk is not a lawsuit. It is leverage. A relationship that sours while the other party holds your domain is a bad position, and it is entirely avoidable by getting the paperwork right at handover.
When PakCEC delivers custom software development or website development, handover includes the assignment and the credentials, because a deliverable you cannot legally control is not finished.
Asset 4: Your packaging and product design
This is the one that catches manufacturers, and it turns on a provision almost nobody outside IP practice knows.
Industrial designs in Pakistan are protected by registration under the Registered Designs Ordinance 2000. Copyright and registered design do not overlap: where a design is registered, copyright does not subsist in it.
Now the part that matters. Copyright in a registrable design that has not been registered ceases once articles applying that design have been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process.
Read that again if you make things. Your bottle shape, your container form, your distinctive packaging. If it was capable of design registration and you did not register it, whatever copyright protection it had evaporated somewhere around your first production run.
Do you own it? If it is registered as a design, yes. If not, and you have made more than fifty by industrial process, probably not in any useful sense.
Could you prove it? A design registration certificate. There is no informal equivalent.
What happens if challenged? More commonly, nothing challenges you. A competitor simply copies the shape, and you discover you have no basis to stop them.
For water plant installation and cosmetics plant installation clients this is worth deciding at design stage. The moment to register a bottle shape is before the mould is cut, not after the market likes it.
Asset 5: Your formula, recipe or process
Here you have a real strategic choice, and it is the only asset on this list where not registering can be the smarter answer.
Patent it. A patent under the Patents Ordinance 2000 gives you twenty years from the filing date. In exchange, you publish. The whole point of the bargain is disclosure, so your formulation becomes public reading.
Keep it secret. No expiry, no publication, no registration. But no protection either if somebody independently develops it or reverse engineers it. Your defence is contractual and practical: confidentiality clauses, restricted access, and not telling people who do not need to know.
For most Pakistani food, beverage and cosmetics manufacturers, secrecy is the better fit. Formulations are often not novel enough to patent, and publishing the recipe to protect it for twenty years is a poor trade when the commercial life of the product may be shorter than that.
Could you prove it? For a trade secret, prove that you treated it as secret. Confidentiality clauses in employment contracts, restricted documentation, controlled access. A formula everybody in the plant can photograph is not a protected secret, whatever your contracts say.
Asset 6: Your photographs and content
Do you own it? Photographs are artistic works, so the photographer is the first owner. Same rule, same fix. Product shots, factory photography, staff portraits, drone footage.
Could you prove it? Signed assignment, or a licence broad enough to cover what you are actually doing with the images. Check what you agreed. Website use and a national billboard campaign are different scopes.
What happens if challenged? Stock photography is where this actually bites. Using images without a valid licence produces demand letters from rights enforcement agencies, and those arrive by email with an invoice attached rather than through a court.
Copyright runs long, generally the author’s life plus fifty years, so an unresolved question here does not quietly expire.
Asset 7: Your certifications and marks
A point of clarity that saves confusion. Your PSQCA certification mark licence and your ISO certificate are permissions to use marks that belong to somebody else. They are not your intellectual property, they expire, and they are conditional on continued compliance.
They also do not protect your brand. PSQCA product certification says your product meets a standard. It says nothing about who may use your name.
Worth noting alongside this: Pakistan has had a dedicated geographical indications regime since 2020, which matters for regionally distinctive products.
The three moments this actually matters
Ownership questions sit dormant for years and then arrive all at once. Knowing when tells you how urgent your gaps are.
When somebody wants to buy in. Investors and acquirers run diligence, and IP is a standard checklist item. A company that cannot show title to its own brand and artwork gets a lower valuation, an indemnity clause, or a delayed close while it chases a designer from 2019. PakCEC has seen all three.
When a relationship ends badly. The designer, the agency, the technical co-founder, the employee who built the system. While everyone is friendly, informal arrangements work fine. The paperwork exists for the day they stop being friendly, which is exactly the day it becomes impossible to obtain.
When you succeed. Nobody copies a product that is not selling. The moment your packaging works, your shape gets imitated and your name appears on somebody else’s label. That is the point at which you discover whether you registered anything, and it is far too late to start.
The pattern across all three is the same. Protection is cheap in advance and unobtainable in arrears.
Common myths worth correcting
We have used it for years, so it is ours. Prior use gives you an argument, not a certificate. Against a registered proprietor, you are the one explaining yourself.
We paid for it, so we own it. Payment buys the work. A signed assignment moves the right. Two separate things.
It is copyrighted because we put the symbol on it. The symbol has no legal effect on ownership. Copyright arose when the work was created, in favour of whoever created it.
Our NDA covers it. An NDA restricts disclosure. It does not transfer ownership, and the two get confused constantly.
We will register once we are bigger. First to file does not wait for you to be ready.
What registration actually buys you
| Right | Governing law | Term | Registration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trademark | Trade Marks Ordinance 2001 | Ten years from filing, renewable indefinitely in ten year terms | Required for the strong position, first to file |
| Copyright | Copyright Ordinance 1962, amended 2000 | Generally life of the author plus fifty years | Automatic on creation, registration is evidence |
| Patent | Patents Ordinance 2000 | Twenty years from filing | Required, and it publishes your invention |
| Registered design | Registered Designs Ordinance 2000 | Fixed term, renewable | Required, and copyright will not save you without it |
All of it is administered by the Intellectual Property Organization of Pakistan, established under the IPO-Pakistan Act 2012. The Trade Marks Registry itself is older than the organisation that houses it, operating from Karachi since 1948 with a Lahore branch since 1974 and an application desk in Islamabad since 2010. It functions as a civil court, and its decisions are appealable to the provincial high courts.
Two practical notes for filing. Trademarks are classified across forty five classes, one to thirty four for goods and thirty five to forty five for services, and you file in the classes your business actually operates in. And if you have filed in another Paris Convention country, you have a six month priority window to file in Pakistan claiming that earlier date.
Your audit, in one sitting
Six checks. None takes long, and the value is entirely in doing them before you need the answers.
- Search the trademark register for your brand name in your classes. Find out whether somebody else is already there.
- Find your assignments. Logo, website, code, photography. If you cannot find them, they probably do not exist.
- Check who controls your domain and hosting. Registrar account, in whose name, with whose email as recovery.
- List anything you make more than fifty of that has a distinctive shape or design, and decide whether it should be registered.
- Ask whether your formula is protected by anything other than hope. Contracts, access controls, or neither.
- Check your image licences against how you are actually using the images.
Anything that comes back uncertain is not an emergency. It is a task. Most of these are fixed with a signed page and a filing, and all of them get harder the longer they sit.
Where PakCEC fits
Twenty years, more than 3,000 completed registrations and certifications, and a consistent observation across all of them. Businesses protect the assets they can see, like plant and stock, and leave the ones they cannot see entirely undefended.
Tell us what you have built and what you are selling under, and we will tell you what is actually protected. See our intellectual property services, our wider business consultancy in Pakistan range, or talk to the PakCEC team.
