Goods and Services for a EU Trademark – PART 2

 THE NICE CLASSIFICATION

Now it’s definitely clear. A Trademark is not only a sign, but also the goods and services therein.

We have seen how it’s difficult that a Trademark could cover all the entire range of products and services available, because there are hundreds and hundreds of goods and services and especially because claiming all of them would represent a very relevant effort in terms of taxes, marketing, operative and legal costs, and so on. Anyway, at the same time, we have understood that it’s important, before filing the application for the registration, to widen as more as possible the range of goods and services, making at the same time a two levels analysis on what is the current business  linked to the Trademark and also what are all the potential and future ones. To do this we have also learnt that goods and services need to be chosen under a list of macro-classes. And, last but not least, we have discovered what’s the “place” where goods and services have been classified. That “place”, even if not proper to talk of a place, is the “Nice Classification”, namely “The International Classification of Goods and Services for the Purposes of the Registration of Marks”.

The Nice Classification (NCL) is in few words an international agreement concluded at the Nice Diplomatic Conference, on June 15, 1957 and then continuously revised during the years by its Country Members. The Countries party to NCL constitute a Special Union within the framework of the Paris Union for the Protection of Industrial Property. They have adopted and apply the Nice Classification for the purposes of the registration of marks. The European Union has adopted the NCL as the unique method to classify goods and services to be associated with Trademarks.

Each of the countries party to the Nice Agreement is obliged to apply the NCL in connection with the registration of marks, either as the principal classification or as a subsidiary classification, and has to include in the official documents and publications relating to the registrations of trademarks the numbers of the classes of the Classification to which the goods or services for which the marks are registered belong.

The NCL is a system of classifying goods and services for Trademark applications, including the EUIPO’s one. It consists of 45 macro-classes, where “goods” are allocated in and between Classes from n. 1 to n. 34 and “services” to Classes from n. 35 to n. 45. Each class is represented by a class heading, which gives general information about the type of goods or services covered. For example, the Class 12 heading (so we talk about a “goods” class) is “Vehicles; apparatus for locomotion by land, air or water” whereas the Class 43 heading (namely a “service” class) is “Services for providing food and drink; temporary accommodation”.

Together with the headings, that represent a sort of generical indication, there are several set of internationally approved terms within each class, in order to better define the goods or services that have to be protected by the Trademark application. Both the headings and the terms are object of continuous revisions, made by the parties of the NCL System. In the last twenty years, due especially to the booming phenomena of internet and of the new technologies, there have been several revisions of the NCL. The last one has been issued on 2022 (the 12^th Edition) and it’s in force since January 2023.

Wanna take a look to the NCL class headings? Click this link and start surfing therein