On Monday, 10 September 2018 the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) launched a free Regional Intellectual Property (IP) Database at the ARIPO Headquarters in Harare, Zimbabwe. The centralized database contains published Patents, Designs and Trade marks (IP titles) from ARIPO and its member states.
The development of the IP Database has been concluded with support from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) who are reported to have provided the software for the database and assisted with the extraction of published IP data from the IPAS systems in the member states.
According to ARIPO’s director general Fernando dos Santos, the IP Database is designed to efficiently serve multiple purposes, including on-line provision of published IP data, encouragement of regional trade, IP scientific research, IP rights protection and enforcement in the ARIPO region as well as sustainable development of IP.
The regional database is expected to significantly contribute to the improved use and uptake of IP in the ARIPO region thereby increasing the number of local and regional applications which is still very low. According to WIPO’s 2016 IP Statistics Report, Africa as a whole accounted for just 0.6% of the total IP designs, patents and trade mark applications filed internationally.
The regional IP database has information on published IP titles from the ARIPO office and twelve (12) of its member states including Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
As it stands, there are over 400,000 trade mark publications in the database across the 13 different offices (ARIPO, Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe) with the largest number of filings recorded from the Kenyan office (74,940).
The launch of ARIPO’s Regional IP Database is a significant step towards the consolidation of trade mark data worldwide. ARIPO’s Regional IP Database together with the EUIPO’s TMView platform will provide users with free and wide access to already published IP titles across major parts of the globe.
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