Amendments to Nice Agreements

  Trademark owners could benefit from proposed changes contained in the Treaty of Nice that entered into force on February 1.
 
 The Treaty will adapt European institutions in readiness for ten new members in 2004 - the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
 
 It allows for major reforms of the judicial system to tackle case overload and speed up judgments, including the option of setting up judicial panels to deal with certain types of cases.
 
 For intellectual property, judicial panels are seen as a way to ease the growing trademark caseload of the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance. If established, the panels would become the first layer of judicial control for the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) (OHIM).
 
 The panels could be set up in two ways changing the Boards of Appeal or establishing them alongside each other.
 Sources in Alicante believe that if the Boards of Appeal were changed to judicial chambers, this would benefit trademark owners because the Office could challenge decisions, leading to enhanced legal security.
 But if judicial chambers were established alongside the Boards, this could create confusion by having too many legal layers and lead to greater expense for trademark owners.
 
 All proposals for judicial chambers are still under discussion.
 
 Ingrid Hering
 EU Website