Intellectual Property: 2017 IN STATISTICS

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the European Union Intellectual Property Organization (EUIPO) have recently published their statistics regarding information on applications and cases filed during the year 2017. What is impressive is the amount of registrations at both Organizations, which in 2017 reached an unprecedented number.

                                                                                         Source: Shutterstock 

I. International Registrations filed at WIPO

An impressive 56.200 trademark applications were filed in 2017 via the Madrid System, the system administered by WIPO, which allows and simplifies the procedure of registration of trademarks on an international level. This is a 5% increase from 2016, while the countries that could be described as application “champions” are the US, Germany, China, France and the UK. A number of 7.884 applications have been filed by the US alone, whereas, the most important increase came from China, where applications grew by a double-digit 36,3%. On the other hand, Italy Austria and the Netherlands were the three countries where a small drop in filings was noticed. Back to the “champions”, the companies with the most filings were L’Oréal, Novartis and Abercrombie & Fitch Europe, to name a few.

II. UDRP-Proceedings

2017 was also a record year for the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) with 3.074 cases filed. 17% of them were country code top-level domain (ccTLD) disputes.

Furthermore, in 2017, the WIPO Center received 52 mediation and arbitration cases and 84 good offices requests, a rather insignificant upturn from 2016 when all these cases and requests reached the number of 114, with Europe being the top applicant.

III. EUIPO EUTM applications

In 2017, the EUIPO saw the highest number of trade mark applications in its history, namely around 147.418 applications, which was also an increase of 8% from the previous year. More than half of those (53%) were for word marks with applications for figurative marks following in a close second (46%). The newly introduced collective and certification mark applications gathered 119 and 58 filings, respectively. Collective marks, on the one hand, are defined as signs which distinguish the geographical origin or means of production of the product represented, whereas, on the other hand certification marks are used to define the quality standard of a particular product. Once again, Germany, the US and China hold the record for the most applications.

From all those trademarks the vast majority was also registered in the end (128.375 of them were registered in 2017) with a slight increase from 2016 (almost 126.000 trade marks were registered then). This fact could be attributed to the small decline in oppositions in comparison to 2016 (only 18.646 oppositions were pursued in 2017 if one takes the large number of applications into account) in connection to the slight downturn of trademark cancellations (832 in 2016 against 755 in 2017).

The upcoming growth of filings is actually showcased in the number of applications filed in January 2018 (12.106), a notable rise of 22% from the same period in 2017, which might lead to another record year in the field of Intellectual Property.

For more information please be referred to:

https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/contentPdfs/about_euipo/the_office/statistics-of-european-union-trade-marks_en.pdf

http://www.wipo.int/ipstats/en/

http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2018/article_0001.html

http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2018/article_0002.html

https://www.marques.org/class46/