2019 Alt Legal/World Trademark Review Study Released
Alt Legal Team | April 29, 2019
For the third year in a row, Alt Legal collaborated with the World Trademark Review and other intellectual property experts to publish a study examining IP offices around the world and explore the innovative tools and services they provide to applicants.
This year, the most innovative IP office this year was once again the EUIPO. Other IP offices are certainly catching up to the EUIPO and its consistent record of innovation, as Chile, Singapore, Spain, and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five. Additionally, our research this year saw more website accessibility from the various offices as well as a couple of offices providing bulk data access for third parties.
The innovation study ranked the top 50 IP offices based on a variety of different factors such as value-added propositions, online capabilities, and public outreach efforts. The bulk of the research conducted by Alt Legal focused mainly on the online capabilities that the IP offices provided. This included e-filing capabilities, website functionality and accessibility, as well as API (application programming interface) offerings.
To evaluate website accessibility, we recorded the availability of each IP office’s website and recorded the status every minute. After a ten day period, we determined whether or not the websites were available more than 99% of the time, between 90% and 99% of the time, or less than 90% of the time. Based on the results from last year’s study, the number of websites that were available more than 99% of the time increased from 64% to 70%.
This year, both Mexico and Singapore made their trademark data publicly available via API, bringing the total count to 18 IP offices offering bulk data to third parties. While many IP offices have yet to make their data publicly available, progress is being made as more offices are providing API and other data tools for third party software developers. At this point, the New Zealand IP office is still the only office that allows third-party tools to create applications and even respond to office actions. The list below shows all the IP offices that currently provide API tools for third-party software developers:
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Australia
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Austria
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Canada
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Chile
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Czech Republic
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European Union
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France
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Germany
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Israel
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Mexico
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New Zealand
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Russia
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Singapore
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South Korea
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Spain
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Switzerland
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United Kingdom
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United States
In addition to the innovation study, our CEO Nehal Madhani and Legal Operations Associate Justin Wickersham published an article discussing how IP offices are taking advantage of AI technology to help with the trademark application and examination process. Over 20 IP offices throughout the world use AI tools to complete tasks today, including automatic classification, figurative element searches, help desk services, and data analyses.
Read the Innovation Study here, and the AI article here.
Lastly, since publication, IP offices have already taken note of our study and issued several press releases. In particular, Singapore officials seemed particularly thrilled with their ranking this year. You can check out some of the press here: