Protection of Intellectual Property assets of Germany, the United States and China through Community Trademarks

Abstract

Presently, there are three trademark protection systems that coexist on the territory of the European Union: the national, the international and the Community systems. The introduction of the Community system came as a necessity for obtaining protection through a single registration on throughout all the EU member states. This work makes a comparative analysis about the evolution of the applications submitted at OHIM – Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, by holders from Germany, the United States and China between 1996 and 2012. The study contains determining the variation in total number of the applications submitted by each state, products and services class structure of the requests as well as the place each class occupy in the total registrations. From this research were determined the interests of the countries analysed in the field of trademark protection in Community system on the European Union market.
Keywords: Community trademark, European Union market, Intellectual property, Trademark registration.