International Trademark Registration Cost: Eurasian Economic Union

---

Published on 10 December 2020

In one of our previous articles, The Eurasian Patent Office: Offering Substantial Savings, we illuminated the costs of protecting inventions and innovations (i.e., the costs of patent protection) with the Eurasian Patent Office. In this article, we shall delve into the question of how much it costs to register a trademark in the member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The Eurasian Economic Union

The Eurasian Economic Union is one of the newer international organizations for regional economic integration; it only recently came into existence in January 2015, with the signing of the Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union in May 2014, by Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Its membership has subsequently expanded to five, with the induction of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. The organization represents an "integrated single market of 183 million people and Gross Domestic Product ("GDP") of over $4 trillion (PPP)" for the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people (Zhandos Ybrayev, 2018).

Why Register Trademarks in the Eurasian Economic Union?

Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan are currently featured in the top 50 in the Ease of Doing Business Index rankings, the World Bank's flagship ranking from 1-190, in which "economies are ranked on their ease of doing business." The Index is a powerful tool that can influence investment decisions; multi-national corporations widely rely on the Index to guide their strategic investment decisions (Ricardo Pinheiro-Alves and João Zambujal-Oliveira, 2012).

Thus, the developing and budding economies in the Eurasian Economic Union may serve as attractive destinations for inclusion in an international trademark filing strategy on the basis of: growth or market potential, Foreign Direct Investment inflows, consumer spending potential, favorable Intellectual Property and/or business regulations.

Trademark Registration Systems in the Eurasian Economic Union

Unlike the centralized Eurasian Patent Office located in Moscow, which has received more than 50,000 patent applications, there is no centralized Eurasian Trademark Office. This means that registering a trademark in the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union will require the filing of five separate National trademark applications. The applications may be filed directly in the member States of interest, or through the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which is an international treaty administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

The Madrid Protocol and the International Trademark Registration System

Alternately, since all five member states of the Eurasian Economic Union are also signatories of the Madrid Protocol, trademark protection may also be sought via the Madrid Protocol. The Protocol is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization and facilitates the international filing and registration of trademarks in a cost-effective and streamlined manner in over 100 countries, with Canada being the latest to join the bandwagon on March 18, 2019.

A trademark registered under the Madrid Protocol is valid for ten years from the date on which the mark is recorded in the International Register and can be renewed for successive ten-year periods.

Regional Eurasian Trademark Registration System

A regional Eurasian trademark system is on the anvil. The draft "Treaty on Trademarks, Service Marks and Appellations of Origin of the EAEU Goods", which envisages a "Eurasian Union Trademark", was approved by the Eurasian Economic Commission Council in March 2016. Further, in December 2018, the Eurasian Economic Commission Council signed the Agreement on EAEU Trademarks, Service Marks and Appellations of Origin, which is expected to be implemented in 2020, after the adoption of implementing regulations (Julia Zhevid, 2018).

However, it is to be noted that the draft Treaty does not envisage the "creation of a regional trademark office, rather it provides for collaboration of all Eurasian Economic Union countries' PTOs in examining an application for registration of a Union Trademark", which would be subsequently valid in all five member states (Evgeny Alexandrov, 2017). Thus, a separate trademark examination fee is payable to the National Trademark Office of each member state, with just one application filing fee and one registration fee being payable to the National Trademark Office with which the trademark application is filed (Tatyana Kulikova and Julia Zhevid, 2017).

The proposed Eurasian trademark system is expected to facilitate simultaneous trademark protection in all the member states through the filing of just one application with any of the National Trademark Offices of the member states, thereby resulting in the quickening and the streamlining of the process, in addition to the lowering of costs (Tatyana Kulikova and Julia Zhevid, 2017). Further, the system also offers the possibility of a single trademark attorney handling the entire process, as compared to different attorneys handling the process in each member state.

Trademark Application Filings in the Eurasian Economic Union

As per the World Intellectual Property Indicators 2018 published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the National Intellectual Property/Trademark Offices of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia received more than 325,000 trademark applications in the year 2017. This figure is comparable with that for the European Union Intellectual Property Office, which received close to 370,000 applications.

With Russia being the most influential economy in Eurasia, it is not surprising that more than 85% of the trademark applications were filed with the Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property.

The National Intellectual Property/Trademark Offices of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia were also designated in approximately 30,000 international trademark applications in the year 2017. This figure is higher than the number of designations received by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, which stood at about 23,000 in 2017.

International Trademark Registration Cost

Let us now discuss the costs involved in registering an international trademark in the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The costs are generally dependent on the number of classes of goods and services under which the trademark application is filed. The current version of the 'International Classification of Goods and Services' (Nice Agreement Eleventh Edition - Version 2019) contains 34 classes for goods and 11 classes for services.

Let us consider a trademark application with a single priority claim that is to be filed electronically under four classes in the aforementioned jurisdictions. For instance, the applicant could be a beverages company wishing to register under Class 29 (Milk), Class 30 (Coffee and Tea), Class 31 (Beverages for Animals), and Class 32 (Non-Alcoholic Beverages and Fruit Beverages).

We shall assume that a multi-class international trademark application designating the aforementioned countries is to be filed under the Madrid Protocol with the United States Patent and Trademark Office as the originating office.

For the above scenario, the estimated costs of trademark protection under four classes, from filing through registration, add up to approximately US $3,100. The costs are based on the assumption that the applications get registered without any objections from the respective Trademark Offices, with no oppositions being filed after publication. Further, the costs are exclusive of the attorney charges for the filing of the international trademark application under the Madrid Protocol.

International Trademark Registration - Filing Fees

As shown in Table 1, the estimated costs of filing the international trademark application under the Madrid Protocol are inclusive of the basic international application filing fee, the certification fee charged by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the complementary fee for the designation of each Madrid Protocol member state of interest (except those in respect of which an individual fee is payable), the supplementary fee for filing in an additional class beyond the third class, and the individual fees in the applicable Madrid Protocol member states.

The complementary fee is applicable to two of the five jurisdictions (i.e., Kazakhstan and Russia). Armenia, Belarus, and , Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, charge individual fees for the international application, in addition to a fee for filing in each additional class beyond either the first class (Armenia and Kyrgyzstan) or the third class (Belarus).

The approximate individual international trademark application filing fees vary between US $220 in Armenia to US $598 in Belarus, while the approximate additional class fees vary between US $50 in Belarus to US $478 in Kyrgyzstan.

International Trademark Cost Calculators

Worried about keeping pace with the dynamic trademark costs landscape? The Global IP Estimator and the Portfolio Estimator - Trademarks are smart, robust, cutting edge international Trademark cost calculators from the stables of Quantify IP, which greatly simplify the arduous and challenging task of Intellectual Property budgeting management. They offer what traditional Intellectual Property docketing software and trademark portfolio management software do not - they can instantly and accurately calculate the costs of worldwide protection for either a single patent, trademark, design, or utility model, or a portfolio of trademarks, respectively. The calculations may be fine-tuned to the level of any particular stage of an Intellectual Property across its lifecycle, such as patent annuity costs or trademark renewal costs. Therefore, they can also function as patent annuity cost calculators or trademark renewal cost calculators.

The addition of Quantify IP's Intellectual Property Cost Calculators has empowered the decision-makers in many Fortune 500 companies and over 70% of the top 100 IP law firms in the U.S. to solve diverse challenges in managing Intellectual Property budgets. To see what our Intellectual Property portfolio software can do for you, email us at qipcontact@quantifyip.com or call us at +1-808-891-0099.

Venkatesh Viswanath (Senior Content Strategist, Quantify IP) contributed to this article.
Exchange Rates Used: 1 U.S. Dollar = 1 Swiss Franc
Note: The estimates and fees depicted in this article are based on the Official Fee Schedules as of May 28, 2019