MARQUES has received from its friends and colleagues at the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) the welcome and exciting news that the OHIM Academy has been busy again. The Academy's website, it will be recalled, hosts the latest Common Practice (CP) document, reflecting the hard work put in by OHIM and national offices all round Europe in trying to make sure that they all apply their common legal rules in a consistent, intelligible and predictable manner.

There is much interest in document CP5: "Relative Grounds – Likelihood of Confusion (Impact of non-distinctive/weak components)".  As trade mark practitioners are only too painfully aware, this topic has been a constantly troublesome issue around Europe since, if you think about it, measuring the effect of a weak component is far more difficult than gauging the impact of a strong one.  

You can access CP5 for yourself by clicking here, not just in English but in any one of 24 European languages. Better still, there are PowerPoint based training materials on the same page and, best of all, there is now a complete set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), again in all 24 languages, designed specially for ... you!