In a recent presentation, Mr Vincent O Reilly, Director of the Department for Industrial Property Policy at the OHIM, lifted the curtain on a new OHIM project. The Alicante Office plans to edit a database for the comparison of goods and services.

Data incorporated in the database will be taken from Office decisions, primarily from opposition, decisions of the European Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance and OHIM's Boards of Appeal. The content should be in English language only (source material will be translated into English when necessary).

The content will be compulsory for examiners, but it will not bind Boards of Appeal. Once tested and considered satisfactory the database will be publicly available online, presumably in the first half of 2010.