IPOPHL makes room for nontraditional trademarks

The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippine (IPOPHL) has promulgated the revised rules and regulations governing its trademark system, paving the way for nontraditional marks to be acceptable.

IPOPHL said on Wednesday that the new rules under its memorandum circular (MC) 2023-001 had taken effect on Feb. 14, replacing the trademark regulations put in place back in 2017.

“MC 2023-001 institutionalizes the protection of nontraditional visual marks. With this, IPOPHL is now clear with the acceptability of color marks per se, motion marks, position marks and hologram marks,” IPOPHL director general Rowel Barba said in a statement.

The amendments list down acceptable representations of nontraditional marks, particularly drawings that depict a series of movements.

An IPOPHL representative told the Inquirer that a popular example of a nontraditional trademark was Columbia Pictures’ zoom-in view of a female statue at the beginning of all its movies.

The new IPOHL rules also specify that applications should include only one drawing representation in a single-perspective view if the mark sufficiently depicts all features.

The new regulations also recognize that color marks, three dimensional marks, position marks and motion marks may be filed as long as these portray an acquired distinctiveness as defined under the IP Code of 1997.

The mandatory online filing, which has been in place since September 2020, has also been formally implemented under the updated regulations.

All communication with the Bureau of Trademarks (BOT) will now be transmitted via their online platforms, e-TMFile and eDocFile.

Similarly, messages coming from the BOT will be transmitted via e-correspondence, meaning that trademark applicants or their appointed agents or representatives are required to ensure that their email addresses are updated in the system.

—Alden M. Monzon