Four jurisdictions agree to adopt list of acceptable goods and services

Trade mark owners who apply to register their marks in Singapore, the US, Japan and the EU will soon be able to avail themselves of a harmonization of specifications of goods and services acceptable to the respective Registries, namely IPOS (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore), USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), JPO (Japan Patent Office) and OHIM (Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market).

These four Registries signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) on 15 December 2010 to validate an agreed list of goods and services that would be acceptable or otherwise in all four jurisdictions. The list of acceptable goods and services, incorporated in a list known as the Trilateral List, will be an expansion of the current International (Nice) Classification of Goods and Services. With this Trilateral List, trade mark applicants in any of the four jurisdictions would be able to rely on and/or claim goods and services from this List. In doing so, their trade mark applications are unlikely to face specification objections by the four Registries (the Trilateral Partners). This should help facilitate processing of applications and reduce costs associated with Office Actions issued in relation to specification objections.

With the establishment of the Trilateral List, a wider and more extensive list of acceptable goods and services will be available to trade mark owners to adopt, if and where appropriate in the context of their business activities. This should help reduce uncertainty in terms of the descriptions of goods and services that are acceptable to IPOS and the other Trilateral Partners, hence promoting more consistent and efficient examination of specifications among the four jurisdictions.

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