OHIM
OHIM, national offices and user organisations have been working for more than a year under the Convergence Programme to find a more permanent solution, he says, and quite recently the working group reached agreement in principle on a new approach to be presented and endorsed by all national offices.
“Tis approach, using a new set of agreed general indications called ‘Class Scopes’ will be based on the taxonomy system created in the context of the Harmonisation of Classification project, which arises directly out of the work on EuroClass,” Campinos explains.
EuroClass helps with the classification of goods and services, allowing comparison of the classification databases of the participating offices. It provides a list of descriptions of goods and services that have been accepted by each office and, where no entry is found, it provides a list of similar terms in the classes searched. EuroClass has 90,000 terms translated into 22 languages. It already comprises data from 25 offices including Switzerland and the US, with the Japan Patent Office about to follow.
Campinos explains that the taxonomy is a new hierarchical structure of goods and
António Campinos
services under the Nice Classification, with broader terms on top and more specific terms below, which has been drawn up in order to facilitate data maintenance and improve users’ experience in finding the appropriate goods and services.
A Class Scope is a group of terms which,
collectively, designate all known goods and services within a class at a specific point in time, and consists of the highest level of group titles that are acceptable for classification of the taxonomy structure, for a particular class. It is broad enough to cover all classifiable terms in a class, while being specific enough for classification. Tere is agreement among national offices to use Class Scopes, but Campinos cautions that it may be some time before all offices have put it into practice.
A wider view
As demonstrated by the work on Class Scopes, OHIM under Campinos is an organisation with a clear idea of what it wants to achieve. Several major projects are underway, aimed at creating what he calls “a true European trademark network” in which national offices and OHIM work together “to create, by agreement, a
www.worldipreview.com
World Intellectual Property Review September/October 2012
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