Once your trade mark is registered, how safe is it? For its first twelve months, less safe than most brand owners assume – the Registrar of Trade Marks holds a power under section 84A of the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth) to revoke a registration that should never have been granted, and recently the Full Federal Court defined its limits.

A charity had registered BROWN NOSE DAY for bowel cancer fundraising. The owner of the RED NOSE DAY marks did not oppose the application, but later persuaded the Registrar to revoke the registration. In Registrar of Trade Marks v National Cancer Foundation Limited [2026] FCAFC 95, the Full Court held the mark survives. BROWN NOSE DAY is not deceptively similar to RED NOSE DAY, because the colloquial meaning of “brown nose” gives the mark a distinct idea of its own, and consumers in the charity sector are trained to read colour as the feature that separates one fundraising “day” from another.

Two rulings along the way matter well beyond charity campaigns. Deceptive similarity has only one legally correct answer, so there is no safe harbour merely because the examiner’s original call was finely balanced – any error, including an error of judgment, can open the revocation door. But whether it is reasonable to walk through that door is a separate question, and the fact that the call was a close one still counts in the owner’s favour there.

What this means for trade mark registration and brand protection strategy

The durable lessons run in three directions.

If you own a recent registration, its first birthday matters: the Registrar’s window to begin revocation closes twelve months after registration, and after that only a court can remove the mark – so certainty compounds with time, and the heaviest investment in a new brand sits more safely once the window has closed.

If a conflicting mark is heading onto the Register, the lesson is the reverse: a trade mark opposition filed in time is worth far more than a letter to the Registrar afterwards, because revocation is discretionary, was built for administrative error, and – as this case shows – can be resisted all the way to a Full Court.

And when choosing a mark, meaning is your strongest differentiator: sharing words with an established brand is survivable where the mark as a whole conveys a distinct idea, the same imperfect-recollection logic that decided When a Suffix Isn’t a Shield. None of this replaces disciplined brand clearance before adoption – the High Court’s message in You Can’t Backdate Honesty – but it rewards owners who treat the Register as strategic terrain. Watch it. Oppose in time. Choose marks whose meaning does the distinguishing for you. A registered trade mark is property, and the cheapest time to make it secure is at the start.