Beijing Wuyi International Intellectual Property Answers: Check whether the trademark standard provided is text or graphics. The main elements of an ordinary trademark are text (Chinese, English), graphics (including other foreign languages), and combinations of these elements (Note: Three-dimensional trademarks and color trademarks are more difficult to register and are not discussed in this article). A trademark composed of words, its text composition, word (word) meaning, word (word) pronunciation, word (word) composition form, writing method, etc. play a major role in reading and identifying the trademark, and it is easy to understand and The registrability of word trademarks is easy to determine. As the mother tongue, Chinese is easier to determine than English.

The graphics that can constitute a trademark are very wide. Our country’s Trademark Office classifies all components that cannot be intuitively recognized as words (Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin, English) into graphics, from simple geometric shapes to complex It has unique patterns and pictures, beautiful visual appearance, unlimited space for change, and no limitations of language and text, which has obvious visual advantages. Because of the complexity of the types of graphics, it is difficult to identify whether the applied graphic trademark has a similar conflicting prior trademark. To this end, the World Intellectual Property Organization established the "Vienna Agreement on the International Classification of Graphic Elements of Trademarks" in 1973, which divided the graphics used in trademarks into 29 major categories, 144 sub-categories, and 1,887 categories according to their composition types.

However, the ever-changing ways of graphic expression and composition, and many graphics also have the characteristics of several types of graphic elements at the same time, make it impossible for everyone's intuitive feeling and subjective judgment to be different, or even very different. . Even among examiners of the Trademark Office, such differences in judgment on graphic attributes are common, and sometimes the same examiner also has differences at different times. This problem is quite obvious when the Trademark Office divides graphic elements into all graphic trademarks. Because there are actually multiple classification methods for a graphic trademark, although the Trademark Office has long been aware of this problem and has fixed a few experienced examiners for a long time to work on the classification of graphic elements and will not easily change it, this difference cannot be fundamentally eliminated. When the examiner examines graphic trademarks, there are also issues such as how to understand the attribute characteristics of the queried graphic, what elements should be used to search for prior similar trademarks, and how to determine that the graphic constitutes similarity. Therefore, there are also obvious individual differences in the review results. In addition, the graphic trademarks in the trademark database of the Trademark Office are all attribute clusters classified according to the "Vienna Agreement". Especially in popular categories, there are often thousands of trademarks based on certain attribute elements of some geometric figures. If If the geometric pattern also has multiple other graphic element attributes that can be divided, the retrieval query workload can be imagined. Therefore, differences in understanding of graphic classification, negligence caused by visual fatigue, omissions caused by work inertia, and subjective differences in whether graphics are similar or not, may be the most uncertain factors in graphic trademark review. Even the examiners of the Trademark Office cannot avoid this phenomenon, let alone ordinary trademark agents.

Those who have many years of trademark agency experience should know that the Trademark Office generally takes longer to review graphic trademarks than word trademarks, and the review results are far more controversial than word trademarks. In the practice of graphic trademark registration applications, most of the cited trademarks used by the Trademark Office for rejection are unexpected. Anyone who knows the reason will not be surprised at all. This is a normal result caused by the uncertainty of the graphic trademark itself.