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| India undecided on Madrid system |
| D Ravi Kanth / Geneva Mar 10, 2009, 00:19 IST |
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India is yet to decide whether it would join the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO’s) Madrid system for international registration of trademarks, a vital intellectual property instrument that builds consumer confidence and enables companies to maintain their reputation in the marketplace.
New Delhi has been toying with the idea of joining the Madrid system for sometime now. It had held negotiations with WIPO to become a member of the Madrid system. “It is for India to decide about joining the Madrid system,” Francis Gurry, WIPO’s director general, told Business Standard.
The global economic crisis has severely affected the filing and registration of patents, copyrights and trademark applications. “We are all extremely concerned about the impact of the economic crisis on WIPO and we don’t know when it would end,” he told reporters while issuing figures on latest trademark registrations last year.
Though the economic downturn has already slowed down registration of new trademarks, the overall activity in this sphere of intellectual property rights remained robust last year.
WIPO received a record 42,075 applications under the Madrid system for registering trademarks in the targeted countries.
Applicants from Germany topped the list of top filers for the sixteenth year, followed by France, the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux countries, China, Japan and Russia.
“The continued growth in the use of international trademark system underlines the pivotal importance of trademarks to business particularly within the challenging economic times,” said Francis Gurry.
“Even in economically difficult times, business continues to recognise that a trademark is a smart investment in a company’s reputation and a long-term sustainability,” he argued.
Germany’s Lidl ranked as the largest filer for trademarks with 216 applications last year. Nestle from Switzerland, Henkel (Germany), Boerhringer Ingelheim (Germany), Novartis (Switzerland), and Zhejiang Medicine Company (China) and L’Oreal (France) among others topped the list for new trademarks last year.
For most of the companies seeking new trademarks, China and Russia remained the most designated countries. With 17, 829 designations, China accounted for 4.7% of the total number of new designations followed by the Russian Federation with 16,768 designations.
Incidentally, China and Russia also account for substantial breach of trademarks in the world.
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