Hot off the GI press: the MARQUES GI Team is happy to report that on Tuesday, 12 September, the European Parliament voted in favour of adopting the Regulation on geographical indication (GI) protection for crafts and industrial products, also commonly referred to as the non-agri GI protection.

The system has similar features as the current agri GI schemes, though for the non-agri GIs the protection is based on the product’s quality or reputation and not to the ‘terroir’ (the soil, climate, etc).

Registration will be a two-phase procedure, first a national, then a Union phase. However, for those Member States who do not have a national scheme for non-Agri GIs, the application will be directly submitted on the Union level, with the EUIPO serving as the administrative authority and responsible for the examination.

Bearing in mind that for agri GIs currently the European Commission is the competent authority, the appointing of the EUIPO is a significant one. Opinions vary if the choice of the EUIPO is a good or bad one.

Points for discussion

Further elements that are worth mentioning, which will also be discussed in the GI workshop during the MARQUES Annual Conference on 21 September, led by the GI Team, are the following:

Non-agri GIs will use the same PGI logo as alcoholic drinks and agricultural products.

The scope of protection, in the final text, has defined evocation as one of the situations GIs are protected against. This “shall be deemed to arise, in particular, where a sufficiently direct and clear link with the product covered by the registered geographical indication is created in the mind of the average European consumer who is reasonably well-informed and reasonably observant and circumspect” (article 40 paragraph 2).

Also, the protection is explicitly applicable to domain name use, goods in transit and online sales (electronic commerce).

Next steps

Once the Council formally approves the text, and it is entered into force 20 days after its publication in the Official Journal, the new EU non-agri GI scheme will be applicable in two years. This may well result in between 300 and 800 craft and industrial products being protected under this scheme.

By Thera Adam-van Straaten, Senior Office Partner Netherlands, Eversheds Sutherland and a member of the MARQUES GI Team. The Team’s workshop ‘What you always wanted to know about GIs but never dared to ask!’ takes place in Berlin on 21 September at 14.00 and again at 15.30.

Read more about the vote on non-agri GIs on the EUIPO website here.