OHIM to Improve Online Filing Process for Designs and Trademarks

The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) plan on rolling out some changes to the online filing process of Community Designs and Community Trade Marks through the implementation of new software to make the experience more user friendly.

The new Community Design Registration tool will adapt the software filing tool to that of the software used in the rest of the OHIM website. One benefit of such an adaption would be an end to failures associated with the uploading of multiple design images.

In addition to this, the new filing tool allows for an additional 3 views to be submitted as non-protected views which may be exchanged with protected views during the examination process. It is hoped that the new filing tool will also allow for the submission of PDF, TIF and PNG files in addition to the current JPEG format.

The new software also allows for the submission of 3D files and can either generate seven perspectives/views of the object in 3D, or in the alternative, allow the user to submitting screen shots of their seven preferred views.

In addition to the above changes in to the filing of Community Designs, there are changes in store for the process of filing Community Trade Marks. Every trade mark has to be designated to a good or a service to which the trade mark applies. Typically, the process of attributing a goods and or services to a trade mark application has involved scanning the classification lists for the appropriate goods and or services to which the product relates and marking this in the trade mark application. The proposed new software tool would allow a user to enter a list of terms which the software tool will automatically classify into goods and/or services.  In the alternative, the tool may provide different or additional terms based on the terms in the harmonised database. The list generated may then be stored for later use.

An advantage of this is that if the trade mark application contains terms from the database exclusive, the application is fast tracked and examined within 6.5 days.

These changes certainly go a long way to improving the efficiency and accuracy of the filing process for both designs and trademarks and can only be a benefit to the end user and ultimately the client.