EUIPO reported on 7 July that it received 104,263 EU trade mark applications between January and June 2026, up 8.4% year on year, while EU design applications totalled 61,951, down about 1%. Combined filings reached 166,214, the Office’s highest first-half total on record. The increase was driven by trade marks rather than designs, but the design figure remains strong enough to show that demand for unitary EU protection is holding up.The more practical change came with the design framework fully applicable from 1 July. EUIPO now accepts dynamic 3D representations in OBJ and STL formats and...
Following the launch of the EU–Japan Intellectual Property Action on 27 April and the May renewal of the JPO–EUIPO memorandum on trade marks and designs, the Japan Patent Office has further clarified how the cooperation is expected to work in cross-border e-commerce cases. The emerging framework centres on faster exchanges of information about suspected trade mark and design infringements, allowing platforms, rights holders and competent authorities in both markets to align evidence and enforcement steps before sellers shift listings or inventory across borders.The mechanism will not...
A 14 July analysis by Lewis Silkin offers one of the clearest practical summaries to date of the Unified Patent Court’s fee framework. The basic rule is that the unsuccessful party bears the other side’s reasonable and proportionate costs, although the Court may adjust the allocation on fairness grounds. Fixed court fees are €14,600 for infringement actions, €26,500 for revocation actions and €300 for protective letters, with additional value-based fees once the amount in dispute exceeds €500,000. Even where several patentees or defendants are involved, the fixed fee is generally charged...
The EPO’s 2026 Guidelines for Examination took effect in April, and a continuing series of Marks & Clerk analyses has highlighted three procedural changes with immediate practical relevance. PACE requests for accelerated search have been withdrawn because the EPO now treats timely search reports as part of its normal workflow, although accelerated examination under PACE remains available. Applicants therefore have less reason to focus on expediting search and more reason to prepare early for the transition from the search opinion into substantive examination.The treatment of amendments has...
France’s National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) has accepted an application for protected geographical indication status for Morta, the fossilised wood found in the Brière marshes. Filed by the Association des artisans de la Morta en Brière (ABAM), it is the third application handled by INPI under the EU’s new geographical indication framework for craft and industrial products, after santons de Provence and espadrilles de Catalogne.The rules have applied since 1 December 2025. INPI examines the national stage, while the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) is...
On 4 December 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Joined Cases C-580/23 and C-795/23 on the copyright standard for works of applied art. Case C-795/23 arose from the dispute between USM and Konektra over the USM Haller modular furniture system. The Court held that applied art is not subject to a higher originality threshold than other works: protection depends on whether the object reflects free and creative choices that express the author’s personality. Choices dictated by technical function, ergonomics, safety requirements or industry standards do not, by...
Recent EU trademark decisions confirm that the public’s level of attention is only one element in the global assessment of likelihood of confusion, not a switch that determines the outcome by itself. In Kutxabank v EUIPO – Klarna Bank (K.) (T‑105/25, 13 May 2026), the General Court showed that confusion may still arise among a highly attentive public where the services are identical and the signs are strongly similar visually and identical phonetically. Conversely, greater attention can sharpen distinctions where the goods or services are more remote or the overall differences between the...
On 1 August 2026, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) issued its first-month examination feedback following the 1 July rollout of the revised EU design framework. With MP4, OBJ, STL and other dynamic or three-dimensional digital formats now accepted, early filings have exposed a practical weakness: visual disclaimers created through blurring, colour masking or similar techniques often fail to remain consistent across animation frames or viewing angles, particularly in files generated by AI tools or exported directly from modelling software.EUIPO’s message is...
WIPO’s International Bureau issued a Hague System practice update on 7 August 2026 confirming that multiple international design applications designating the European Union are no longer constrained by the requirement that all designs belong to the same Locarno class. As the EU design reform is implemented, applicants can therefore place designs from different classes—such as a product casing, a graphical user interface and packaging—in a single Hague application designating the EU, subject to the revised multiple-application fee structure.The procedural change makes portfolio filing...
EUIPO’s Design Reform framework now brings several practical changes into sharper focus under the renamed “EU Design” system, replacing the former Registered Community Design terminology. Multiple applications are no longer confined by the former Locarno-class unity requirement, although a single filing may contain no more than 50 designs. The representation rules have also become more digital: dynamic 3D models may be filed in formats such as OBJ and STL, while animations can be represented through video files, giving applicants a clearer route for protecting moving graphical user...
On 10 March 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on copyright and generative AI that sends a clear policy signal to the Commission and the market: if a generative AI service operates in or targets the EU, it should not be able to evade EU copyright rules simply because model training took place outside the Union. The resolution argues for a more enforceable connection between transparency duties, rightsholder reservations and practical enforcement, so that non-compliant providers do not gain a structural advantage over compliant competitors.
What makes the text especially...
In March 2026, the EUIPO used a joint webinar to push the implementation signal of CP16 and CP17 into the market again. The two Common Practices focus respectively on when a sign describing the subject matter of goods or services may be refused as descriptive, and when a slogan can still function as a trade mark. What matters here is less a sudden statutory change than a broader shift in examination culture: issues that used to depend heavily on office-specific instincts are being pulled into a more structured and more predictable framework across European trade mark practice.For brand...
On 26 March 2026, Advocate General Nicholas Emiliou delivered his Opinion in Case C-579/24 Austro-Mechana and AKM, adding an important new layer to the licensing architecture for online content-sharing service providers under the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. In his view, when users upload protected content to a platform, the process does not involve only an act of communication to the public or making available to the public; it also involves acts of reproduction in the form of digital copies made on the platform’s servers.The real significance of the Opinion,...
At the end of March, the European Patent Office (EPO) publicly outlined the latest outcome of its dialogue with the German Association of Industry Intellectual Property Experts (VPP) and major corporate representatives: AI will continue to be integrated more deeply into the patent granting process and user-facing services, but this will not mean handing legal judgment over to machines. The shared position is becoming clearer: AI should strengthen efficiency, consistency and accessibility, while final legal decisions, procedural control and institutional accountability must remain firmly in...
In March 2026, EUIPO completed two closely linked moves in the digital-enforcement space. From 3 to 5 March, it co-hosted an IP OSINT Tools Workshop with the Spanish National Police in Gran Canaria to help enforcement officers use open-source intelligence tools against online piracy, counterfeiting and other cyber-enabled crime. Then, on 19 and 20 March in Athens, it trained judges and prosecutors through a practical seminar on moving “from the open web to the dark web,” placing open-web intelligence, dark-web awareness and OSINT exercises directly inside a judicial-learning framework. For...
Recent media reports indicate that a German publisher has sued an AI company over generative AI-related copyright issues, with the dispute framed around the use of training data, whether model training can amount to reproduction of protected works, and how legally relevant similarity between outputs and original works should be assessed. The case has drawn attention not only because it sits at the intersection of German copyright law and AI training practices, but also because it signals that traditional content rightsholders are increasingly willing to use litigation in more jurisdictions...
The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has updated its “Design forms and fees” page with effect from 1 April 2026 to reflect the forms and fees now applicable to UK design filings. The updated guidance makes the charging structure for registered designs easier to read in practice because it distinguishes not only between online and paper filing, but also between single and multiple applications. Under the current figures, an online single application costs £60. Online multiple applications are priced on a tiered basis: £85 for up to 10 designs, £110 for up to 20, £135 for up to 30,...
On 1 April 2026, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced that filing in DOCX is now available to all users after a successful pilot phase. Under the accompanying news item, presidential decision and Official Journal notice, European patent applications and subsequent documents may now, in addition to existing formats such as PDF, be filed in DOCX via Online Filing 2.0 and, where applicable, via MyEPO. The change is framed as part of the EPO’s broader digital transformation and its move toward end-to-end digital processing.The practical significance goes well beyond adding another upload...
In its 2026 revision list to the Guidelines for Examination, the EPO expressly identifies the “Abolition of PACE for search” as one of the main amendments in Part E on procedural matters. This is more than editorial housekeeping. It reflects a reordering of how acceleration is meant to work in European patent practice: for newer European filings, the EPO has for years relied on a service objective to issue the extended or partial search report within six months rather than on routine applicant-triggered PACE requests for search; it then confirmed in a formal notice published at the end of...
The EUIPO’s current Trade Mark Guidelines have made the treatment of virtual goods, NFTs and metaverse-related trade mark issues much more specific. According to the Office’s public guidance pages, the version currently in force was adopted by the Executive Director on 30 April 2025 and took effect on 1 May 2025. For applicants, the important point is not the date alone. It is that examination has shifted from asking whether these filings are possible at all to asking whether they are drafted with enough precision.This is not a cosmetic update driven by buzzwords. It is a meaningful...
