WIPO assembles in Geneva
Member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently assembled in Geneva to make decisions that will affect the global intellectual property stakeholders.
The Singapore Treaty Assembly approved changes to regulations of the Singapore Treaty on the Law on Trademarks (STLT), providing uniform standards for the representation of non-traditional marks.
These include hologram, motion, colour, position and sound marks.
The delegation from China, according to the draft report of the assembly, understands that hologram, position and three-dimensional marks are attracting “increasing attention” from enterprises.
“[Amendments to] the regulations under the STLT would help to harmonise the practices of different countries and provide better services to applicants.”
The treaty aims to harmonise trademark registration procedures across its 23 contracting states. These also make up the assembly of the STLT. The new amendments came into force on November 1.
The general assembly of all the WIPO member states agreed to a new language policy for the organisation.
It is hoped that the language coverage of the WIPO will be broadened to include as many official organisation documents as possible.
Member states instructed the WIPO secretariat to look into outsourcing translation services and agreed on a phased implementation of the new language policy.
The “working languages” of the organisation, as set out in its rules of procedure, are English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.
According to a WIPO secretariat paper on language policy, one in five of the organisation’s official meetings have documentation translated into all of the working languages.
The paper also states that the language policy will be deployed by 2015.
