On March the 23rd 2016 the new EU Regulation n. 2015/2424 of the European Parliament and of the Council will enter into force: the Community trademark will be named European Union trademark, and the agency in charge of issuing it (now the Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market, OHIM, the biggest decentralized agency of the Union) will be the European Union Office for Intellectual Property (EUIPO).

However, the new dispositions will not concern names only.

The history of the first instrument for protecting Intellectual Property valid throughout Europe starts in 1993, when the regulation on the Community trade mark created OHIM, where over time were registered up to 100.000 trademarks a year. Such rising trend confirmed the need to set up a protection system – and market – for Intellectual Property between Member States more harmonized and governed by rules granting its efficiency.

So, in 2008 the Commission started a process for evaluating the system of laws, and a study of the Max Planck Institute contributed to elaborating a draft of the law addressed to a public consultation and to the impact evaluation: the text published resulted from negotiations between institutions, but the process will be officially concluded only after 21 months from the entry into force, when the last technical changes will be implemented by secondary legislation.

Besides institutional and fiscal changes, on the technical side several news were introduced in all aspects of the trademark discipline, with the final aim of “modernizing the Union trademark by making it more effective, efficient and consistent on the whole, and by adjusting it to the Internet Era”, read the recitals in the Regulation.

This is true starting from the discipline of anteriority search on trademarks, which will be optional and simpler, with the expressly stated aim of “making it more flexible in terms of needs and preferences of the user”. The European legislator, both on the European and the national markets, requires the searching procedure to be integrated with general search engines, fast and powerful, available to the public for free and in cooperation between EUIPO and IP central offices of the Member States, including Benelux Office for Intellectual Property.

The looks of EU trademark will be modified too, since the Regulation eliminated the graphic representation criteria from its definition, from now on just requiring a clear, precise, self-sufficient, easily accessible, intelligible, lasting and objective representation. This refers, again, to new needs imposed by new materials, technologies and printing techniques.

As far as the processing of applications for registration is concerned, it will be entirely upon EUIPO, since it won’t be possible any longer to submit the application to national offices, this way increasing rapidity and uniformity standards.

Coherently, appeals against a decision of the Agency will be faster and will better ensure legal certainty.