Re: Who really benefits from 60-day period?

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 01:18 PM 01/08/97 -0500, Leo Smith wrote:

>Leo Smith wrote to Carl Oppedahl

>>If WIPO sets up their own
>>database on trademarks, and if WIPO's computers can have daily access to
>>new CORE URL registrations, then trademark dispute letters from WIPO
>>should go out very quickly to the new registrant, putting the 
>>registrant on notice that a trademark infringement claim may exist. 

>To which Carl replied:

>I am sorry but your sense of the present or possible roles of WIPO are
>quite mistaken.  There is no single place now, not at WIPO nor anywhere
>else, that all the trademarks of the world are kept in a database.  Nor
>will there ever be, at WIPO or anywhere else.  

>To which Leo replies

>What's your opinion on the trademark search engine located at
>http://www.trademark.org/tmindex.html????

Well, I went to that site and plugged in a couple of trademarks I know
about, and they were not found.  So the site database comes nowhere close
to being comprehensive.

The impression I have is that the organizer of that site has in mind that
people will *pay* to have their trademark registrations listed there?  Or
that the organizer hopes that all the trademark offices of the world will
hand over their databases for free to be loaded into that site?

Of the approximately 180 countries that have trademark offices, fewer than
two dozen have online databases.  The rest use paper files.  I can't see
how that site is going to provide searching capability with respect to
countries that have only paper files.