Following the enactment of the Act amending the Industrial Property Law of 20 February 2019 which implements the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council (EU) 2015/2436 of 16 December 2015, the Polish Patent Office (PPO) has recently published guidelines (in Polish) concerning new types of trademarks.

In the guidelines, the PPO points out that a trademark can now be represented in any form, using commonly available technology, provided it can be displayed in the trademark register in a “clear, precise, self-contained, easily accessible, intelligible, durable, and objective” manner. When filing a trademark application, one should indicate the type of trademark from the following list:

• word
• word-graphic
• graphic
• three-dimensional
• position
• pattern
• colour/combination of colours
• sound
• motion
• multimedia
• holographic
• “other”

If the applicant fails to indicate any of the above-mentioned categories, the PPO will ascribe a type to the trademark application at its discretion. The applicant can contest this decision within a deadline set by the PPO.

According to the guidelines, a trademark representation cannot be replaced by providing a description of the mark in question, or by attaching a sample of the product. The requirements for conventional trademark types such as word, word-graphic, three-dimensional, position, pattern, or colour marks do not differ significantly from those indicated in the prior guidelines. The PPO now also accepts MP3 and MP4 file formats which enables registration of multimedia trademarks and simplifies the application process with respect to sound, motion, and holographic trademarks.

Concerning the category “other “ for marks which do not fall into any of the afore-mentioned categories, such as, for example, olfactory, or flavour marks, the PPO does not foresee any possibility for registering them considering the current state of technology.

Earlier this year, our European shared recordings of our webinar sessions focusing on the implementation of the EU Trade Marks Directive and its impact across various Member States including Poland. As follow-up, we published an info-sheet which covers the key developments  and includes a quick-reference comparative table. This post updates the information on guidance for new types of marks in Poland.

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