How will the Madrid Protocol work?

The Senate approved the initiative that included Chile into the group of 124 member countries.

The Madrid Protocol is a system for the international registration of trademarks, which allows the applicants of the contracting parties to request, for a single time, that the said trademarks be registered in several countries. 

How does it work for Chileans who want to use the system?  

Firstly, you need to be the holder of a trademark registration or of a trademark application in Chile.  

Having done so, you must file an application for the international registration of your trademark before the National Industrial Property Institute (INAPI), who will act as “Office of Origin”.

This office will certify the application, and it will communicate it to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) based on Geneva, the “International Office”. The WIPO will perform a formal analysis of the request, and, if everything is correct, it will register de trademark in the international registry, publish it in its gazette, and communicate it to all the countries designated by you in your application, the “Designated Offices”.  

Subsequently, a substantial analysis will be performed, i.e., determine if the trademark can or cannot be admitted for registration, in each of the Designated Offices, who will apply their internal regulations to take the decision.  

As to the costs: “The cost of the international registration of a trademark includes the basic fee (653 Swiss francs, or 903 Swiss francs for a color trademark *) and other costs, depending on the countries in which the trademark is intended to be protected, and the number of classes of products and services to be covered by the said registration”, as indicated in the webpage of the WIPO, https://www.wipo.int/madrid/es/, which includes a fee calculator. 

Upon the enactment of the Protocol, the local work for the technical adaptation to the system begins, which often implies lower costs and a gain of time for the national applicants. We look forward to its implementation and launching.