According to J Pereira da Cruz shareholder Jorge Cruz, SMEs will be most interested in the alterations, as they will require companies to prepare application materials more quickly.
“They are trying to make things faster than they are now,” Cruz told Managing IP . “This will not be so much of a problem for larger, more organised companies.”
Published on July 25, Decree-Law 143/2008 is a statute altering the mechanisms for the protection and access to industrial property in Portugal. It makes significant alterations to the previous Industrial Property Code, which came into force on July 1 2003.
Among them is the establishment of rules for provisional patent applications, as well as an amendment stating that the filing of periodical declarations of intent to use (DIUs) will no longer be required in order to keep a trade mark registration in force. This is one of the few alterations that have taken immediate effect.
In general, the latest round of amendments has been designed to simplify procedures before Portugal’s Trade Mark Office. But Cruz said it is not certain that has been achieved. "There wasn’t necessarily a strong reason to change the law now, but laws do need updating every now and again,” he said.
Among other things, the 2003 Code transposed some EU legislation to Portuguese law and adopted rules from the TRIPs Agreement. Before 2003, the previous amendments to the original 1837 Portuguese law regarding patents came in 1940 and 1995. had several other laws concerning patents, trade marks and other IP rights between 1837 and 1940. But in 1940, a new codified law was enacted covering various private rights such as inventions, utility models, models and industrial designs, rewards, shop names and signs and denominations of origin. The law also included a chapter covering unfair competition and criminal offences regarding the infringement of IP rights.
The main alterations in the latest Code are: the adoption of a provisional patent application; the abolition of the examination of design applications, unless an opposition is filed; the increase in the number of objects that can be contained in multiple design applications to a maximum of 100; the abolition of the categories of rights “name of establishment” and “emblem of establishment”, which are now included under a new category of “logos”; and the abolition of the need to file DIUs.
For trade mark registrations that are in an irregular situation due to the non-filing of previous DIUs, it is stipulated in the transitional provisions that this irregularity is automatically corrected.
