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International exchange of trademark information in machine-readable form (e.g., Official Gazettes)
Participation in international or regional activities and projects related to trademark information
Assistance to developing countries
Other activities
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The Official Bulletin of the Industrial Property Office of the Czech Republic has been published exclusively electronically since the beginning 2007. The Official Bulletin is published on a weekly basis (updated every Wednesday) instead of the monthly basis as before. The paper version has been discontinued.
Electronic version of the Official Bulletin has been available since 2000 (Czech version, English version has been available since 2007) and accessible at the Office’s web site:
http://www.upv.cz/cs/publikace/vestnik-upv.html (Czech version)
http://www.upv.cz/en/publications/ipo-bulletin.html (English version)
Various courses and seminars were organized for students and representatives of SMEs or research institutions; Groups of university students were accepted for excursions and guided tour in the Office’s premises.
Participation in international or regional activities and projects related to trademark information
The Office continued its cooperation with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EU IPO) and took part in a number of multilateral projects. The IPO CZ has been included in a group of so called harmonized participants in the TMclass – Harmonized Database of Products and Services project, The complete TMclass database for classifying products and services has been made accessible to users in the Czech language. The IPO CZ was also participating in the TMview project, which has as its goal to provide users free-of-charge access to information on trademarks valid in the European Union and other participating countires through a unified search interface.
Assistance to developing countries
At the request of the Institute for Intellectual Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Office organized a five-days study visit for its staff members
Other activities
The Industrial Property Office continued to fulfil responsibilities resulting from the Czech Republic's membership in the European Union especially related to the area of industrial property protection. It participated in the meetings of the EU Council Working Group on Intellectual Property.
n 2014 the first results of the Convergence Program organized by EU IPO (formerly OHIM) were put into practice; its goal is the harmonization of decision practice in the trademark areas in the European Union. This is especially with regards to changes in the approach to the classification of goods and services for the purposes of registering trademarks from the point of view of assessing the specificity and accuracy of terms used, the active participation of National Offices in the setting-up and management of the TM Class common database of goods and services, the assessment of the scope of protection of black and white trademarks, and the assessment of relative grounds for rejecting trademark applications. In the following years the work on Convergence Program continued. In October 2015, the Common Communication on the common practice of distinctiveness of figurative marks containing descriptive/non-distinctive words was published and started to be implemented by the IPO CZ.