Results of the Sixth TM5 Annual Meeting

On November 30 and December 1, 2017, the Sixth TM5 Annual Meeting was held in Alicante, Spain, bringing together the officials of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). At the Meeting, each of the lead Offices for the 13 cooperative projects, including the “Bad Faith Trademark Project” and the “Image Search Project” led by the JPO, gave a progress report on its respective projects and proposed ways for advancing them. In addition, the TM5 Offices agreed to promote three new cooperative projects.

Also, on the second day of the Meeting, user sessions were held on Bad Faith Trademarks, Quality Management for Examinations, and other topics, in which the representatives of user associations being invited from industry groups and patent attorney organizations in the TM5 countries actively discussed the various topics with the TM5 Offices.

Further, the TM5 Offices agreed that the KIPO will host the Seventh TM5 Annual Meeting.

Major achievements of the meeting

(1) Quality Management Project (New)

The JPO and the EUIPO jointly proposed a “Quality Management Project,” and the TM5 Offices agreed to add this Project as a new cooperative project.

The Project aims to enhance mutual understanding and trust among the TM5 Offices about each other’s quality management systems by exchanging information on the systems to conduct higher quality examinations and to manage the quality of examinations as well as information on the initiatives for them. Also, the Project is expected to enable the TM5 Offices to better understand the differences between and among their initiatives, so as to, for example, voluntarily reflect them into their own initiatives for quality management, when necessary.

(2) Bad Faith Trademark Project

The JPO proposed ways to increase the number of case examples in a report called “Case Examples of Bad-Faith Trademark Filings,”^*1 which was published at the TM5 Joint Workshop in May 2017.^*2 More specifically, the JPO proposed to be more flexible in terms of formats for describing case examples; to revise “bad faith” categories; and to add case examples from both the TM5 and other countries. The TM5 Offices agreed on the JPO’s proposal.

^*1 NOTE: A report prepared under the leadership of the JPO, in which case examples of bad faith trademark filings at the TM5 Offices are published. The report is uploaded on the TM5 website (http://tmfive.org/ (External link) ).

^*2 NOTE: A Workshop jointly held by the JPO and the International Trademark Association (INTA) during the INTA Annual Meeting in May 2017, as a part of the activities under the “TM5 User Association Involvement Project” led by the JPO and the EUIPO.

(3) Joint Statement

Joint Statement (PDF:181KB)

[Last updated 9 March 2018]

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