UK Trademark Searching

As part of their systems upgrade, that was revealed on 11 February, the UK IPO provided a new trade mark search interface .  It is still listed as find by word or image but there are some important developments that make it a whole lot more useful than the previous version. The biggest, and most significant for unrepresented trademark applicants as well as agents seeking to do economical clearance searches, is that there is a new option to search for 'similar' marks. This is now the default and you may be surprised to find that you get pages of hits when you were expecting just a few from an identical word mark search. You can revert to Exact word or Begins with if you are looking for something specific. However the new option ensures you don't miss the vowel changes. There is no information about the particular fuzzy algorithm they are using but it survived my tests, so I am impressed.

You do hit the buffers, though, if your search wants to deliver more than a 1000 hits.

I did a search for FORTY TWO and got 7 hits but 42 gave me 979 but then that's the meaning of life isn't it?

Another change is that instead of offering you spaces for several words that you could AND or OR together, you can type in a bunch of words and choose to have the search for all of them or any of them.

The search will retrieve you any mark protected in the UK and community trademarks and Madrid registrations are displayed in a new format. There is no link direct to CTM online or Romarin, which is frustrating especially when your CTM hit comes up with a status of OPPOSED very tantalising that.

Have fun

New name, new website, same old headache, speedier recovery?

The new Intellectual Property Office or IPO (formerly UK-IPO, formerly Patent Office) website has just gone live. It's divided between pages that are for the use of practitioners (the Professional bit) and those for the use of laymen and amateurs (the standard bit, or IP-lite if you prefer). You can switch between the two, using the little box at the top right hand corner of the active part of the web page. Once on the Profession pages, the Law & Practice, Forms & Fees and Online Services bits are easy to access. The IPO, to its credit, sought and received user input in the form of that cute little software that lets people sort cards corresponding to their frequency of use of different pages on the site.

There's always the headache of bookmarks being lost, but the IPO reckons that users will be redirected to the the 100 most heavily-used bookmarks, which should soften the blow.

Can I suggest that, through the Comments feature of this blog, we take note of the new site's good points and bad points? I had hoped that the page background of the Professional and standard pages would be in different colours, so that users could instantly see if they were in the right place for forms and fees or if they were about to be confronted with Novelty Norvello ...