Three new ways to manage Madrid

The services will allow users of the Madrid System to track their documentation, watch any mark and manage their portfolio. “This was a big leap for us, particularly Madrid Portfolio Manager,” said Neil Wilson, Director of the Functional Support Division at WIPO. “We will be carrying out user satisfaction surveys in the next three to six months as well, so we want to know what you think about them.”

Former INTA President Anne Gundelfinger stood up and asked the first question of Wilson, giving some immediate feedback. “These are great programs and I welcome them, but frankly they don’t go far enough,” she said. “I would like to be able to designate an email address for communications when I make an application, rather than waiting for the registration. And when will there be online forms rather than just a form you download and email?”

Wilson clarified that you can designate an email address upon application, and indeed this was something WIPO was now encouraging users to do. As to the online forms, he said: “This is a first best effort. We are happy to extend the services in any way you want and we plan to put some of the most popular forms online.”

Madrid Portfolio Manager (MPM), probably the most complex of the new services, is a web tool that allows owners of international registrations and their representatives to access their international trademark portfolios. This should be especially helpful when submitting new requests for recordal in the WIPO International Trademark Registry. To access MPM, all a user needs is a WIPO user account linked to an email address. Then they can establish a portfolio by collecting all the international registrations linked to the same email address.

Madrid Real-time Status (MRS) is a standalone tool that provides the immediate status of trademark documents being processed by WIPO. Launch a query through MRS concerning a specific international trademark registration and receive a list of all related events recorded or in the process of being recorded in the International Trademark Registry. This allows you to see what is happening to your request at any point in time.

Lastly, Madrid Electronic Alert (MEA) is a free watch service designed to inform anyone interested in the status of selected registrations. MEA subscribers receive daily email alerts when changes are recorded in the Register. WIPO user account holders can create a list of international registration numbers of particular interest, and receive an email each time an inscription concerning one of them is recorded in the Register. These messages provide a hyperlink to Romarin, the Register database, where the user can find further details of the changes.Earlier in the Madrid System Users Meeting, Ricardo Blancaflor, director general of the Philippines IP Office, had given a speech explaining how he dealt with opposition from trademark attorneys to the country joining Madrid: “Once we talked to them, every business group in the country supported our position. And in the end, lawyers have to follow their clients.” Officers from the Egyptian, EU and Swiss trademark offices also gave presentations on their processes, and took questions from users.