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6 October 2020

On October 2, 2020, the annual meeting of the heads of the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) was held via videoconference.

The parties exchanged information on the latest updates in their activities related to industrial designs.

EAPO President Ms. Saule Tlevlessova spoke about the progress of the project aimed at creating a Eurasian system of legal protection of industrial designs, ratification of the Protocol on the Protection of Industrial Designs to the Eurasian Patent Convention (EAPC) in the EAPC member states, as well as about other events that took place a year after the diplomatic conference was held in Nur-Sultan, Republic of Kazakhstan.

The EUIPO delegation was informed about the fact that EAPO, together with patent offices of the EAPC member states, is developing the Patent Instruction and other normative documents in the field of regional legal protection of industrial designs, and preparing information systems for conducting work with industrial designs, which is to start in 2021.

Particular attention was paid to the development of bilateral cooperation between the two IP offices. S. Tlevlessova expressed gratitude to EUIPO for conducting training on tools for working with industrial designs for EAPO employees and representatives of the EAPC member states at the EAPO headquarters in December 2019, and emphasized the importance of the Eurasian region countries studying the European Union experience in legal protection of industrial designs, development of technical tools to support patent office work on industrial designs, and expressed interest in continuing such cooperation.

The EAPO President confirmed the relevance of the bilateral work plan for the current period and called for the use of a remote interaction format in the absence of the possibility of holding events in person.

The EUIPO delegation, in turn, spoke on the current activities of the office and plans for its development in the coming years, provided statistical information on registered objects, which, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, shows increasing interest in industrial design registration in the countries of the European Union, both in the region and abroad.

The EUIPO delegation supported the proposal for a wider use of the remote format for bilateral interaction, in particular, to provide EAPO with consulting and technical support on integration with the DesignView search system, which will allow providing information on registered Eurasian industrial designs immediately from the start of operations, and introduce other IT tools and technologies used in EUIPO.

According to A. Di Carlo, Deputy Executive Director of EUIPO, EUIPO, for which cooperation with EAPO is one of the key areas of international activity, welcomes the rapid pace of EAPO preparation for accepting applications for the grant of Eurasian industrial design patents, and expresses its readiness to provide any assistance EAPO will require while working on industrial designs.

The parties agreed to hold a meeting at the end of this year to sum up the first results of their cooperation.

Based on the EAPO materials.

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