PTO creates Transitory Commission to help tackle workload

The Transitory Commission of the Peruvian Trademark Office (PTO) has been created by means of Resolution No 113-2014-INDECOPI/COD. The commission will be operational until December 31 2014.

All the proceedings handled by the PTO are normally decided by a commission consisting of four members. Over the past years, this commission has had a significant workload, which meant that the PTO took a long time to solve cases and proceedings such as trademark registrations, oppositions, cancellations, infringements and injunctions. This situation was not beneficial for trademark holders and applicants.

Due to the fact that the commission could not decide all the cases in due time, the president of the PTO decided to create a Transitory Commission consisting of four members, which will assist the current commission in solving all pending cases. The Transitory Commission is independent and will help the current commission to tackle the workload. Each commission will solve its own cases separately.

This is an important initiative - the PTO had noticed that it was not solving cases in an efficient way because of its significant workload, so that cases which should have been dealt with in four to six months took a year to solve. With regard to trademark infringement, before the Transitory Commission was created, the PTO issued injunctions or precautionary measures within two to three weeks, even though this type of measures should be issued within 48 hours, or one week at most.

The idea behind the initiative is that, once the Transitory Commission has concluded its task in December, the PTO's affairs will be in order.

Adriana Barrera, BARLAW - Barrera & Asociados, Lima