European Chamber Advocacy Actions

Advocacy Actions

2015-06-11 > Beijing, Shanghai

CTMO Lobby letter on Acceptance of Non-English Characters

"The trade mark application form requires an applicant to complete its name and address in Chinese and English characters. Over the years, the requirement to use English characters has not been strictly enforced such that German, French, Danish etc. characters (e.g. “β”, “ö”, “ǽ”, “ø”) have been accepted and appear on the Office's online database and on registration certificates.

Without prior notification, the Office is now strictly enforcing the requirement to only use English characters. Thus, applications containing non-English characters in the applicant's name and address are being rejected. To confound matters, the International Registration Department is simply deleting the umlauts, which unfortunately can make trade mark unenforceable as many European authorities will refuse to notarise a power of attorney where there are differences in the required signatory is a "Mr. Moller" rather than the "Mr. Möller" or "Mr. Moeller" standing before them, who may be the actual owner of the mark in question."

2015-06-11 > Shanghai