Newsletter
PENDING TRADEMARK APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE FOR SEARCHES
It currently takes six months to one year to complete examination of a trademark application. Trademark searches performed prior to submission of a trademark application can quickly determine if a mark is eligible for registration. In the past, the data available for trademark searches included only trademarks which had been approved for publication or registered by the trademark authority. The public was not able to search trademarks which were pending in the application process. As a result, trademark searches were relatively inaccurate. To remedy the problem, the Intellectual Property Office recently included pending trademark applications as items open for search by the public.
Because of computer system limitations, however, searches of pending trademark applications can only be made for identical trademarks and not for similar ones. Moreover, because of the time needed to enter data of new applications, pending applications from the most recent two months cannot be searched.