TRADEMARK CLASSIFICATION

The International Classification of Goods and Services for the Purposes of the Registration of Marks was established by virtue of an arrangement concluded at the Diplomatic Conference held in Nice on June 15, 1957, revised in Stockholm in 1967 and in Geneva in 1977, and amended in 1979.

The countries party to the Nice Agreement constitute a Special Union within the framework of the Paris Union for the Protection of Industrial Property. These countries have adopted and apply the Nice Classification for trademark registration purposes. For the purposes of trademark registration, each country party to the Nice Agreement is required to apply the Nice Classification, either as a principal or as a subsidiary system, and to indicate in the official documents and publications relating to its trademark registrations the numbers of the classes of the Classification in which the goods and services for which the marks are registered are included.

The application of the Nice Classification is not only mandatory for registering trademarks at the national level in the countries party to the Nice Agreement, but also for the international registration of trademarks carried out by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI), the Benelux Organization for Intellectual Property (BOIP), the International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO). The Nice Classification is also applied in several countries that are not party to the Nice Agreement.

Revisions of the Nice Classification
The Nice Classification is based on the Classification established in 1935 by the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI), predecessor of WIPO. That Classification, comprising a list of 34 classes and an alphabetical list of goods, was the one adopted under the Nice Agreement, and was later extended to include 11 classes of services and an alphabetical list of such services. The Nice Agreement provides for the establishment of a Committee of Experts in which all countries party to the Agreement are represented.

The Committee of Experts decides on all changes to be made to the Classification, in particular the transfer of goods or services from one class to another, the updating of the alphabetical list and the incorporation of the necessary explanatory notes. Since the entry into force of the Nice Agreement on April 8, 1961, the Committee of Experts has held 25 sessions, and counts among its most important achievements the general revision as to the form of the alphabetical list of goods and services (in the late 1970s); the substantial modification of the text of the general remarks, class headings and explanatory notes (in 1982); the addition of a "base number" for each product or service in the alphabetical list (in 1990), enabling the user to easily locate the equivalent product or service in the alphabetical list of the various language versions of the Classification, as well as the revision of class 42, with the creation of classes 43 to 45 (in 2000).

During its twenty-fifth session, held in April 2015, the Committee of Experts, which now holds annual rather than five-yearly sessions, adopted the changes to be introduced in the tenth edition, 2015 version of the Nice Classification.

Editions of the Nice Classification
The first edition of the Nice Classification was published in 1963, the second in 1971, the third in 1981, the fourth in 1983, the fifth in 1987, the sixth in 1992, the seventh in 1996, the eighth in 2001, the ninth in 2006, and the tenth in 2011. Since 2013, a new version of each edition has been published annually. The current version is the 2016 version of the tenth edition. It entered into force on January 1, 2016.

Source: (WIPO)

See list of classes at miregistrodemarca.com