Do the owners of Brexit's cloned trademarks want to maintain their UK brands?
One of the impacts of the UK leaving the European Union was that trademarks protected in the EU (in some cases since 1996) would no longer provide protection in the UK.
To enable EU trademarks (EUTM) to continue to provide UK protection after Brexit, a process was put in place to create comparable UK trademark registrations for every active EUTM registered when Brexit took effect, as well as comparable UK registrations for every International Registration using the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) Madrid system that designated the EU.
When the Brexit transition period ended on December 31, 2020, over 1.5 million "cloned" UK trademark records were created from existing EUTMs and International Registrations designating the EU.
As a result, the UK trademark register more than tripled in size overnight—from 720,000 records on December 31, 2020, to 2.189 million records on January 1, 2021 (Figure 1). Since then, over 300,000 new UK trademark applications have been added, while the number of cloned records has fallen slightly each year as records expire (new cloned records are not being created).
As of July 24, 2023, 11% of cloned EUTM records and 10% of cloned IR (EU) records had been allowed to lapse.
