Marques 2014: OHIM oppositions set to drop 18%

The EU’s trademark agency is set to have received 18% fewer oppositions at the end of 2014 compared with last year, an official has said.

Dimitris Botis, deputy director for legal affairs at the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), was speaking at the Marques annual conference in Copenhagen.

He said it is “really surprising to us” that the number of oppositions last year—17,000—is predicted to drop by 2,000 (18%).

Botis provided several updates and predictions on filing statistics from OHIM, which provides a briefing every year at Marques.

Community trademark registrations are set to reach 117,000 by the end of the year, representing a 2% rise, he said. They are predicted to rise by another 2% the year after, to 120,000, he added.

However, Botis explained, the number of registered designs is expected to fall narrowly from 96,000 last year to 95,000 this year.

Elsewhere, appeals are set to increase from 2,600 in 2013 to 3,200 this year, Botis said, while OHIM expects to have appeared before the general court 407 times in 2014, compared with 226 the previous year.

A day earlier, attendees heard about developments under the Madrid System from Asta Valdimarsdottir, director of the Madrid registry operations division at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

She said that the number of people living in the 92 Madrid-contracted states now totals 4.8 million. By the end of the year, Gambia, Cambodia, and Trinidad and Tobago are likely to have signed up, she said, with countries including Malaysia, Canada and Jamaica following suit in 2015.

Valdimarsdottir reminded attendees to watch out for fraudulent invoices and that “if you have one, please send it to us”.

The conference finishes on September 26.