WASHINGTON - The US Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) hosted the inaugural Industrial Design 5 Forum (ID5) in Alexandria VA, December 3-4, 2015.  The forum consisted of representatives from the USPTO, the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the European Union’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) and the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO).

Acknowledging the growing importance of industrial design, the five largest trademark offices in the world (TM5) created the ID5 forum. The forum focuses on improving consistency in registration policies, cataloging office practices, promoting interoperable procedural frameworks, and protecting emerging designs such as graphical user interfaces (GUIs), animations and other new technology designs, a press release by the USPTO stated. 

During the course of the ID5 conference The USPTO along with the JPO, OHIM, KIPO and SIPO signed an Agreed Statement on Administering a New Industrial Design Framework (ID5). The Agreed Statement recognized the importance of promoting and further development of a user friendly industrial design protection system and endeavored to establish a new industrial design framework comprised of the five offices.

“Industrial designs play a greater, more visible role in the international trade environment,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee, “ID5 brings together the world’s five largest intellectual property offices to explore opportunities for encouraging enhanced and consistence practices that can promote—and further the development of—user-friendly industrial design protection systems on a global scale.”

A portion of the ID5 forum was devoted to the World Intellectual Property Office’s Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs, an international treaty to ease the burden of obtaining industrial design protection in multiple countries and to which the United States acceded in May 2015.

The inaugural ID5 meeting takes place on the heels of the fourth annual meeting of the TM5—that was held at the USPTO’s headquarters December 1–2, 2015. The TM5 is an existing framework, first established in 2001, through which the USPTO, JPO, KIPO, OHIM, and the Trademark Office of the State Administration for of Industry and Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (SAIC), exchange information on trademark-related matters and undertake cooperative activities aimed at harmonizing or improving their respective trademark protection systems and procedures.

Topics discussed at the TM5 meeting included improved and more user-friendly access to trademark information, the continued development of TM5’s Identification List project, issues of trademark taxonomy and indexing, and office practice in handling trademark applications that are filed in bad faith.