China Joins in TMclass

On march 17, 2014, TMclass announced the integration of The State Administration For Industry & Commerce of the People's Republic of China ( SAIC) into TMclass. This latest addition brings a total of 36 national and regional IP Offices, including OHIM, into the Classification of Goods and Services tool. TMclass now offers users the opportunity to search terms in Chinese, in addition to, any of the other 27 available languages.

That's a good news for foreign trademark applicant which is planning to apply for trademark registration in China. The applicant may translate their goods or service items into Chinese and search such goods or service in the Chinese classification to figure out which class it belongs to. Then the applicant can reduce the risk of refusal or rectification for the goods or services. On the other side, the office also benefit from it as less of void or defective applications.

For more information, please look into TMclass (http://oami.europa.eu/ec2/.).