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In 2002, 5,944 new national trademark applications were received, which is an 8% decrease from 2001. The number of pending national trademark applications decreased by more than 2,000, which resulted in a considerable improvement of the pendency time. At the end of the year, 5,141 national trademark applications were pending.
In 2002, the examination of altogether 8,102 national trademark applications were completed. Most cases - 5,564 - ended with registration, 420 cases with rejection, in 265 cases the application was withdrawn and in 1,853 cases the application was considered withdrawn. 131 cases, of which 99 were cancellation procedures and 32 decisions on lapse, were decided by the national trademark board.
During the year under review, 100 new cases to be decided by a board were received. It may be stated that on average the pendency time of such cases decreased to 9 months.
At the end of the year, 65 cases to be decided by a board were pending, of which 50 related to cancellation and 15 to a decision on lapse.
Table 9.: National trademark applications
Table 10.: Figures of national trademarks procedures (1998–2002)
Within the framework of the Madrid System (Madrid Agreement and Madrid Protocol) 7,474 international trademark applications were received. In accordance with the order of procedure, it was not these applications but the substantive examination of those filed in 2001 that constituted the workload. During the year, 7,409 trademarks were registered, invitations to correct defects were issued in 994 cases and the registration of 935 trademarks was refused by the HPO.
Table 11.: International trademark applications and registrations (1998–2002)
In 2002, 1 international application for the protection of appellations of origin was filed under the Lisbon Agreement, the examination of this application is in course.
Under the Madrid System, Hungarian applicants requested the transmittal of 323 trademark cases to the International Bureau of WIPO. The number of pending cases is 159, and that of registered international trademarks of Hungarian origin is 1,834.
The international trademark board made a substantive decision in 61 cases, of which 8 related to cancellation and 53 to lapse by reason of non-use. The number of cases pending before the board is 81, their average pendency time is 12 months.
The electronic version of the 8th edition of the Nice Classification and of the 5th edition of the Vienna Classification was prepared, the new versions of these classifications have been available to the public on the Website of the HPO since September 2002.
TM_I_Tables.doc
II. Matters concerning the generation, reproduction, and distribution of secondary sources of trademark information, i.e., trademark gazettes
In the 107th volume of the official journal of the HPO, the Gazette of Patents and Trademarks, 12 issues were published in 2002. The number of subscribers was 250 in 2000, 232 in 2001 and 200 in 2002. The gradual decrease in subscriptions reflects the widespread use of the public electronic databases of the HPO. In 2002, the size of the Gazette was bigger than ever, it comprised 3,639 pages, within this 3,415 pages belonged to the official columns and 224 pages to the literary part. Taking into account the demands of the international exchange of documents and of education, the average number of copies was 470 per month.
The Industrial Property and Copyright Review, the supplement of the Gazette, was published six times in 2002. For the second year already, it has become, independently as well, a much sought-after publication in the circles of specialists. In 2002, there were no changes in its structure, but the quantity of the published material increased continuously (20%). The size of the column “Studies” almost doubled and amounted to 38% of the total size.
Other publication activities of the HPO were carried out as planned, depending on the availability of manuscripts. Reprints were prepared continuously both in the internal and outside printing offices. In addition to these, 1,330 (1659 in 2001) patent specifications were published in printed and also in electronic formats. The average number of pages of patent specifications was 14.
Digital printing technology was introduced in the first quarter of 2002, the considerable investment came up to the expectations. In 2002, the two main publications of the HPO were produced smoothly during an extremely short manufacturing time, furthermore, the production of several medium standard color publications was transferred to the internal printing office. The start of the digital printing office considerably influenced the work of the Editorial Office. After the technical possibilities and limits had been recognized, the data flow became undisturbed between the Editorial Office and the digital printing office. Smaller quantities were ordered at the same time, and the electronically stored publications could be re-ordered more easily. Some 2.5 million black and white pages were printed by the digital printing office, and 80% of about 250 thousand color pages were produced by an outside printing office.
The Public Industrial Property Aggregate Collection for Search, integrating the data of all titles of industrial property protection into a uniform system, is recognized and used more and more widely. In addition to the quarterly updated DVD version issued for subscription and the version on the Intranet, which has been used by the officials of the HPO for almost two years, this database is already available to outside users on the Internet. It serves not only as an excellent integrated search tool, but by means of directed search it may take up the role of the electronic gazette and electronic registers, with color figures, characteristic texts (patent abstracts in Hungarian and in English, claims, trademark classes, etc), furthermore, it offers the “pdf” version of about 40,000 full text patent specifications for browsing and printing.
The following synoptic tables present the current status of “coverage” by electronic data wealth by titles of industrial property protection.
Table 15.: Trademarks
The attendance of the HPO’s Website increased in the first half of the year, however, not to the same extent as previously, since from January on the independent databases (Hunpatéka Online, Trademark database and Design database) have not been updated, and in April they were removed from the main page and from the site map. On the home page, only the Hungarian industrial property database PIPACS and the gazette database appear. The reason for the existence of the gazette database is that it also shows the state of earlier issues of the gazette, while PIPACS always displays the most recent state. From September on, the attendance values dramatically decreased, because at that time the URL addresses of the earlier databases were redirected to PIPACS. Those persons, who reached the earlier databases through bookmarks or other direct branchpoints, could have access only to PIPACS. Due to the above-mentioned changes, in 2002, the yearly average of attendance was 320,000.
In the first half of the year, we joined an international project of TAIEX (Technical Assistance Information EXchange Office) coordinated by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) that is aimed at the creation of a trademark database and user interface based on new, Internet technologies (Java, XML). Following the integration works, the HPO regularly sends for the international database trademark data according to the xml specification.
On the basis of a contract concluded with Compu-Mark, a global commercial service provider with headquarters in Belgium, trademark data have been supplied monthly as from January 2001.
The production of the TRACES CD, the trademark database of six Central and Eastern European offices, came to a standstill after the 2/2002 issue for lack of the GTI-TM software license. Its restart will be possible at the beginning of 2003.
TM_II_Table.doc
III. Matters concerning classifying, reclassifying and indexing of trademark information
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