MONACO JOINS DESIGNCLASS

As part of its international cooperation program with the European Union Office for Intellectual Property, the Principality of Monaco officially joined DESIGNClass on November 9th, 2020.

In theory, the registration of a design requires to indicate precisely the product to which the design relates.

This step may raise difficulties when the identification of the product to which the design refers (i) is not accepted by the Registration Office, or (ii) does not correspond to the appropriate terminology to qualify the said product.

The Monegasque Office adherence to DESIGNClass addresses this problem since the Office now accepts and uses the list of product terminology offered by DESIGNClass.

This online tool allows you to search in a database, called Harmonised Database of Product Indications (HDBPI), for the product terminology corresponding to the design or model for which registration is considered.

The HDBPI has many advantages:

• It offers a wide choice of product indications (Locarno product indications and those accepted by the Intellectual Property Offices in the European Union);
• It offers easy access, as it follows the same tree structure of classes and sub-classes as the Locarno Classification;
• It is available in 23 languages;
• The convergence of product indications reduces the costs of filing design applications at different Intellectual Property Offices.

The adherence of the Monegasque Industrial Property Office to this European program is a new step in international cooperation in this field, which was already illustrated on January 28th, 2019 by the integration of the Monegasque trademarks to the TMview search tool.