On 18 January 2022, CarIPI organised a regional IT tools workshop directed at the Intellectual Property Offices of the CARIFORUM. The purpose of the workshop was to review the benefits of having a pre-defined and published list of terms of goods and services that are accepted for the purpose registration of trade marks, and it was specially aimed at examiners, users, and SMEs.
As of 13 December 2021, the Trinidad and Tobago Intellectual Property Office (TTIPO) will use and accept the list of terms from the harmonised database of goods and services (HDB) in TMclass.
Following TTIPO’s decision to use the HDB, there are now 21 IP offices outside the EU that use and accept terms from this database.
The inclusion of TTIPO in TMclass brings the total number of participating national and regional IP offices, including ARIPO, OAPI, WIPO and the EUIPO, to 89.
On 10 November 2021, the Government of Jamaica formally deposited its instrument of accession to the Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs.
With its entry into force on February 10 2022, Jamaica will become the 76th member of the Hague System, the unified system for industrial design registration administered by WIPO.
On 9 December 2021, the CARIFORUM Directorate and the CARIFORUM Intellectual Property and Innovation Project, CarIPI, will be launching a new consultation tool, Caribbean TMclass, a regional interface of TMclass.
On 14 December 2021, CarIPI provided a training session in Dutch on trade mark (TM) examination, directed at the IP office (IPO) staff of BIE Suriname. It was also open to legal professionals and IP practitioners in Suriname. The course’s goal was to enhance the IPO’s staff’s capacity to perform their TM examination tasks.
As part of the CarIPI Mentorship Programme, which provides technical support to selected producer groups of origin-linked products, on 26 November the project’s team met with the producer groups of Origin Link Products from the Dominican Republic to gather further information and better plan their engagement in this program.
On 6-7 December, CarIPI collaborated with the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Government of Saint Lucia in organising a 2-day workshop on capacity building for the strategic use of IP by regional producers and exporters in the agro-business sector.
On 17 November, CarIPI joined forces with the Registry of Companies & Intellectual Property of Saint Lucia (ROCIP) in a training directed at trade mark agents of the Office. The purpose of this event was to present the features and benefits of the TMclass tool. During the same session, an EUIPO expert on IT tools ran a demonstration of TMclass, and was available for questions and comments.
As of 15 November 2021, the Antigua and Barbuda Intellectual Property and Companies Office (ABIPCO) will be included in TMclass. ABIPCO will join with the alphabetical list of the Nice classification and a supplement of common terms between the harmonised database of goods and services (HDB) and the Madrid Goods & Services (MGS).
As a result of the joint efforts of the Intellectual Property (IP) Offices/Registries of Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Suriname and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), today we are publishing a Practice Fiche on Graphic Representations of Designs.