EU OHIM's Design Search Tool, Design View

On November 19th 2012, OHIM (Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market) launched a design search tool service called “Design View.”

Design View is an easy design search tool for non-professionals and a useful tool for professionals at the same time.



Design View Web Page

OHIM?

Let’s assuming that Korean company A tries to export a new product in 10 countries out of 27 EU member states.  Company A has to register its own product design at each of 10 countries’ design offices to protect its design right.

However, Company A need to put much time and money into registration because each of design offices has its own procedures and has different languages.

Hence, EU let applicants register its design and trademark at OHIM which extend its protection scope of the right to all members of EU.  

Because OHIM is adopting non-examination registration system, the companies cannot get the design right at the certain office if there is an identical prior-design exists in that design office.

Therefore, company A needs to enforce its prior-design search in each of the EU member design offices before the registration. Design View is a helpful search tool in this case. 

Designe View?

Design View is a single data based single format design search tool. Its database contains OHIM, WIPO databases along with registered designs of 27 EU member design offices.   

The service only provides databases of 9 patent offices as yet.

As you see from this image, the website provides available design offices with green circle on the bottom of the page and the grey circle means the design offices not yet available to provide service. 

The web site provides 1,058,581 cases of design rights, OHIM takes 62% (657,616 cases) and Spain takes 31% (327,866 cases).

Other countries only have less than 3 million cases.

Even though the services not yet provides UK, German, and France’s registered designs, but it has a great potential of being able to include database of EU member states in the future.   

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