Nice classes: heading towards harmonisation
No classification system is ever perfect—debates continue to rage among taxonomists more than 250 years after Carl Linnaeus first conceived his biological classification system.
The Nice system has existed only since 1961, and offices and lawyers will be arguing about the proper classification of goods and services for as long as the system exists. However, it is reasonable to assume that the recently introduced codification will provide some clarity to the classification practice.
The Nice Classification system is a list of 45 classes of goods and services and any item for which protection is sought must be included within one of those 45 classes.
The result is that the number of items which could conceivably be included in any given class is technically infinite and the 45 classes have remained largely intact since they were originally adopted in 1961.
Any newly invented items must be included within the existing class structure. This has meant that some classes have ballooned so that a single class now covers a huge amount of economic activity, while others are very narrowly focused.
The best example of a now-vast class is class 9, which includes apps, computers and digital devices, telecoms equipment, and fire extinguishers.
Other classes have remained fairly well defined—class 15 is often cited as a compact class which covers only musical instruments. Tobacco and smoking items have a class to themselves (class 34) despite the declining popularity of tobacco use.
To assist users of the system each class has a general description of the kinds of goods or services included in that class.
For example, the general description of class 13 is “Firearms; Ammunition and projectiles; Explosives; Fireworks”. Each class also has a much more detailed alphabetical list of goods or services—the alphabetical list for class 13 includes holsters and bandoliers.
Trademark applicants in all EU member states have to specify the goods and services covered by an application.
Until the IP Translator decision, divergent practice developed among IP offices (IPOs), including the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), about whether parties could use the general descriptions, even if those descriptions were pretty vague, and what it meant if a party simply set out the general description as their list of goods or services for a given class.
