PORTUGAL JOINS THE BLOCKCHAIN REGISTRY
As a result of the cooperation between the EUIPO and national IP offices, which continue to work together to expand services for the benefit of users of the IP system, on 31 July Portugal joined industrial property registrations (trademarks and designs) using blockchain technology, becoming one of the pioneers in these registrations, joining the EUIPO and the offices of Latvia, Malta, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Italy in harnessing this technology to boost innovative services for the national innovation and industrial property system.
By creating a high-performance, reliable and secure "Data Transfer Service" between the member organizations and two of the EUIPO's main services, TMview and Designview (the world's largest free online trade mark and design data repositories), which now have 571,000 more trade marks and 58,000 more designs from Portugal, the new blockchain platform now brings together six million trade mark and design registrations.
The blockchain is a decentralised digital ledger (a list of electronic records) of IP transactions maintained over time and protected by cryptography in a chain of records (which constitutes additional protection). The data in the blockchain ledger is distributed among all participating offices.
In practice, the introduction of blockchain into the IP system brings a new layer of reliability to the lifecycle of trade mark and design registrations, guaranteeing redundancy within the European network of member organisations. By ensuring data integrity and security at a higher level, blockchain opens the door to new services that improve connectivity between users and their IP rights, speeding up the connection between all the players in the European IP system.
The integration of blockchain comes as a result of co-operation between the EUIPO and national IP offices that continue to work together to expand services for the benefit of users of the IP system.
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