EUIPO and ISIPO Roll Out CP13 and CP15: Bad-Faith Filings and Goods/Services Comparison Push Trade Mark Practice toward Greater European Consistency

On 24 March 2026, the Icelandic Intellectual Property Office (ISIPO) announced that it had jointly developed and released, together with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), two new implementation documents linked to the CP projects: CP13 on the assessment of trade mark applications made in bad faith, and CP15 on the comparison of goods and services. These are not stand-alone local notes. They are implementation papers built on the common practices developed within the European Union Intellectual Property Network (EUIPN), but adapted to Icelandic legislation and case law. In practical terms, that means Iceland is bringing two highly sensitive areas of trade mark assessment closer to the converging European mainstream.

This matters because the two documents sit at the junction of two of the most consequential questions in trade mark practice. The first is whether an application is part of fair brand building or instead reflects bad-faith behaviour such as appropriation, strategic re-filing, leverage-seeking or other misuse of the system. The second is how goods and services should be compared once a dispute turns on similarity, scope and market relationship. Taken together, CP13 and CP15 do more than tidy up doctrine. They tighten both the entry gate to filing strategy and the interpretative framework for later opposition and invalidity fights.

1. These are not merely technical papers. They translate “bad faith” and “similarity” into a more operational language of examination and dispute analysis.

When businesses see a new practice paper, they often assume it is mainly for examiners. In reality, documents like these re-shape the strategic environment for applicants, opponents, cancellation applicants and representatives. CP13 is particularly important because it tries to move bad faith away from a vague moral label and toward a structured assessment built around evidence, timing, behaviour patterns and commercial logic. The paper emphasises that the applicant’s dishonest intention is the cornerstone of bad faith. At the same time, it does not reduce the exercise to intuition or suspicion. It frames the assessment through relevant, consistent and objective criteria. That shift matters because it makes argument structure more important than rhetorical accusation.

CP15 performs a similar function in the comparison of goods and services. That comparison has always been central to confusion analysis and to opposition or invalidity proceedings, but many real disputes no longer concern only obviously overlapping goods in adjacent boxes of a filing specification. They arise in markets shaped by platform models, software-linked products, retail-service hybrids and category expansion. CP15 reorganises the analytical toolkit around factors such as nature, intended purpose, method of use, complementarity, competition, distribution channels, relevant public and usual origin, while also stressing the importance of market reality. The practical message is clear: comparison is not just about class numbers or formal labels. It is about how goods and services actually meet in commerce.

2. The deeper significance of CP13 is not the label of bad faith itself, but the way it systematises pressure on opportunistic filing behaviour.

The public implementation paper does not pretend that bad faith can be captured in one rigid definition. Instead, it openly recognises that neither Icelandic nor EU trade mark legislation fully defines the concept, and therefore turns to an assessment framework: who bears the initial burden of proof, what time matters when judging the applicant’s state of mind, whether the applicant is linked to another person with the real interest in the filing, which factors are mandatory and which are case-dependent. Most importantly, the document identifies dishonest intention as the basic factor that must always be examined, and then sets out typical scenarios such as parasitic behaviour, breach of a fiduciary relationship, defensive registrations, re-filing and speculative purposes or use of the trade mark as leverage. In other words, conduct that once sat in a grey strategic zone is now more likely to be captured through a broader behavioural reading.

That has direct commercial implications. In some markets, filing has often been treated as a low-cost tactical option: secure the sign, warehouse it, repeat-file it, use it to block entry, seek payment or gain negotiating power later. CP13 makes that playbook less comfortable because it encourages authorities to read time sequence, relationship chain and conduct pattern together. If a filing appears to serve not the essential function of indicating origin but rather the goal of obstructing a third party, extracting value or abusing the system, procedural neatness alone may no longer be enough to shield it. For genuine brand owners, that improves predictability in challenging opportunistic filings. For applicants relying on stockpiled or pressure-oriented filings, it narrows the space for manoeuvre.

3. CP15 sends an equally important signal: the wording of goods and services is not decorative drafting, but the architecture of the right itself.

One of the most consequential features of CP15 is its return to clarity and precision as the centre of specification practice. The document stresses that clarity and precision are not formalistic preferences; they are necessary to define the scope of protection and ensure legal certainty. That creates pressure for applicants that still rely on over-broad wording, vague umbrella formulations or expansive drafting strategies designed to maximise ambiguity. But the paper goes further than simply saying “draft better.” It also addresses what should happen when a term lacks sufficient clarity or precision at the comparison stage. The answer is not to pretend the issue disappears. Rather, the term must be handled through interpretation, linguistic context, classification logic and the applicable legal framework. That is a more mature institutional stance: uncertainty in drafting does not erase the problem; it requires a more disciplined method of dealing with it.

CP15 is also valuable because it organises the post-Canon similarity factors into a more accessible framework. It recognises that there is no mechanical formula, that different factors can carry different weight depending on the circumstances, and that in some cases a single factor may be enough to support a finding of similarity. That is especially important for businesses whose models do not fit old category boundaries: software tied to devices, retail services linked to branded products, platform intermediation connected to physical goods, or data-driven services adjacent to traditional commercial offerings. For those businesses, the decisive question is rarely whether two specifications share a formal label. It is whether the market sees them as substitutable, complementary, channel-adjacent or commercially connected.

4. For businesses operating in Europe, Iceland is not a peripheral footnote here. It is a signal of how convergence travels across the wider European legal space.

It is easy to underestimate Iceland in a broader European trade mark strategy. Yet from a practice perspective, Iceland matters precisely because it shows how EUIPN common practices can radiate beyond the EU’s internal institutional core. ISIPO expressly states that these implementation documents are based on EUIPN projects and adapted to Icelandic legislation and case law, while the papers themselves draw heavily on European case law and shared interpretative understanding. That means a market connected to the European Economic Area is becoming even less likely to sustain a long-term island-style reading of filing conduct or goods/services comparison. For cross-border businesses, the result is a more predictable but also more demanding environment: there is less room to rely on procedural fragmentation or jurisdictional asymmetry.

The useful response for the next 90 days is therefore not merely to note that two documents were published. It is to adjust internal practice. Clearance and source-of-rights review should move earlier, especially where distributors, former employees, commercial partners or agency relationships may be involved. Goods and services drafting should move away from the reflex of writing as broadly as possible and toward language that still supports commercial plans while remaining interpretable and defensible. And dispute strategy should stop treating bad faith and similarity as separate silos. Many cases will now turn not on proving only that the other side behaved dishonestly or only that the goods and services are close, but on whether both lines of argument reinforce each other in a coherent narrative. That is the larger significance of this EUIPO-ISIPO release: it straightens both lines of reasoning at the same time. For serious brand owners, that is welcome. For applicants who depend on ambiguity and strategic friction, the space is getting tighter.