INTA Daily News

U.S. brand owners are being encouraged to make more use of the European Union (EU) Community design system. 

U.S. companies, which are the biggest filers of Community Trade Marks in the world, rank third for Community designs. They have filed only 4,600 applications since the Community design came into being on April 1, 2003. German companies are the biggest filers, with 12,108 applications in the same period, followed by Italians with 6,686 applications.

Despite the Community-wide design having been available for over a year, U.S. applicants do not seem to have picked up on the benefits of the protection available. “This is something we are hoping to change,” Paul Maier, head of the designs department at the European Community Trade Mark and Design office (OHIM), told attendees at the Community design session in the Marriott Imperial Ballroom A on May 2, 2004. 

Maier pointed out that design protection in the EU today is fast, easy and cost-effective and in many cases more effective than trademark protection. Designs can be obtained by filing one single application at OHIM in Alicante.

In the past year, OHIM received 10,691 applications, which included more than 40,000 designs that were filed either through single or multiple design application (multiple designs must be covered by the same Locarno classification).

For 2004 OHIM’s target is to receive more than 50,000 designs. “We are hoping to attract more applications from the US, but also Korea and China,” Maier told the INTA Daily News. 

The session’s second speaker, Gerhard Bauer from Daimler-Chrysler, emphasized the advantages of the system, stressing the attractiveness of the low cost, the possibility to file an unlimited number of designs in one application, the lack of any substantive examination, and the speed of the procedure. 

The Office aims to register a Community design in only three months, though due mainly to technical problems, this deadline has been met in only 20 percent of all applications. But Maier added that the system is still young, and that OHIM is working to overcome technical difficulties and make it even more attractive to applicants over the next year. 

One plan is to develop the search system for Community designs, said Maier. “We are not happy with the way this works at the moment, and we have to make sure that our register will be fully searchable.”

The European Commission has also set in motion a process to consider EU accession to the Hague Agreement on Designs, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Accession would enable owners of European designs to extend their protection to other states, and vice versa.


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