Be Prepared for the UK IPO website migration

On the 6th October the UK Intellectual Property Office is scheduled to fall into line with other government

The original result of searching IP on www.gov.uk

departments and feature only on .gov.uk. The ipo.gov.uk URL will be no more and instead we will be headed to https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office. That link will already work for you today. More information on the staggering transition is currently to be found at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/moving.htm but it might move

As trademark specialists we cannot complain about this consistent branding which guarantees authentic origin to the consumer by placing the www.gov.uk in pride of place. Lets hope that the consumer is savvy enough to appreciate this. It should reduce the risk of them being deceived by other on line UK patent and trademark  renewal and trade mark filing services which charge a premium for their "services".

There is a video tour of the website on YOUTUBE.

If you prefer to be introduced to the new website personally, then there is an event on Thursday 2 October at 88 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AA on Thursday 2 October. Sessions will run at 10am, 11.30am, 1.30pm and 3pm. To register your interest, please email david.barker@ipo.gov.uk stating your preferred session time.

Hopefully, all will go well and we won't find ourselves locked out because the data scrapers believe that there is new information to be scraped (I suspect there is no change in the underlying databases).

They promise that they have tried to preserve the links that we may have already stored and I am hoping that is true because I do have a lot of links to the on line registers and it would be a ball if they were all broken but with our experience of the OHIM transition we know that even such a disaster can be accommodated.

In desperation, I sometimes had to resort to searching the whole IPO database to find some piece of information I needed. Fortunately this is still possible on.gov.uk as they kindly show at 2:21 into the e video as you can limit your results to a particular department and who knows something interesting may have popped up when you searched the whole of gov.uk.

For those of us who cannot cope we can live in the National Archives