A European Commission proposal for reducing the official fees for Community Trade Marks (CTM) has been accepted. There will be a slight increase in the filing fee but the final registration fee will be entirely abolished. The new fees are currently expected to come into force at the beginning of May.
It is also proposed that the abolition of the registration fee will apply to applications pending when the law comes into force, even if previously filed. Thus, those existing applications, which have not received a request for payment of the registration fee by the time the new fees come into force, will be exempt.
The new official fee for filing will be as follows:
€900 (electronic filing)
€1050 (paper or fax filing)
€870 (designations of CTM via International Registrations under the Madrid Protocol, however filed)
The reduction comes since the income from fees at the OHIM surpasses their running expenses. There are also plans to spend the accumulated balances on a number of cooperative projects with national offices in the EU, establishing common search databases and common classification practice.
The revised fees will enable substantial savings for all users of the CTM system, which is expected to be even more competitive with the national trademark registration systems that still exist across the EU.
The GDP of the EU market is $15 Trillion and trade mark protection in all 27 countries, through the filing of a single CTM was always great value for money, but will now be even cheaper.
Meanwhile, despite amendments to the Israel Trademark Law two years back to facilitate implementation of the Madrid protocol in Israel, and a new trademark search engine that enables efficient examination and is also available to the public on the Israel Patent Office website, there has still not been any announcements regarding implementation of the Madrid. I suspect that in the current recession, with registrations in Israel dropping some 30% since the beginning of the year according to informed sources at the IPO, the Patent and Trademark Office, which now operates as a self-funding closed agency, is loath to and probably cannot afford to give up on separate filing and renewal fees per class, since Madrid enables multi-class applications.
