EUIPO launched TMview in 2010 as a tool concentrated on the EU. The idea was to incorporate trade marks from around the EU network into its database, allowing for easy search among the participating EU National Offices and the then OHIM. It was initially launched with trade marks from Benelux, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, the OHIM and WIPO – around four million trade marks in total.

Today, TMview contains over 53 million trade marks from 67 participating offices. It functions as a source of business intelligence as well as a pre-clearance tool, allowing users to see what is on the market, and giving valuable information about trade marks in different economies and regions, and the EUIPO is keen to further improve its functionality.

ECTA is represented in the relevant EUIPO - ECP2 Major Improvements to TMview and DesignView project since 2016 and actively participates in this work.

The recently redesigned TMview Beta interface (https://www.euipn.org/tmview/beta/) allows for a greatly enhanced navigation and search experience. The features include:

• wide set of search criteria which can be personalised and segmented for a quicker and more efficient search;
• results to be shown in order of relevance to the search terms;
• possibility to access previous searches directly from the home page;
• selection and placing of two or more trade marks side by side for comparison purposes;
• easy export of search results to PDF, Excel and Word formats.

For legal purposes, the original version of TMview is still considered to be the valid source of information when extracting documentation to present before EUIPO for earlier trade mark substantiation. The Beta version will run alongside the original version throughout 2020.

We encourage all ECTA members to test the Beta version and provide their feedback either by clicking on the feedback button at the bottom of the page or by sending it to ECTA Secretariat at ecta@ecta.org specifying in the title 'Feedback - TMview Beta version'. ECTA will transmit the feedback to the EUIPO and would greatly welcome your comments as they will help to further improve TMview for the benefit of all users.

This news item was prepared with the assistance of Eva-Maria Strobel, ECTA representative in ECP2 - Major Improvements to TMview and DesignView project.