The last issue of the Official Gazette dated June 22, 2013 was released only recently. In order to make up for the protracted delay in its publication, the Trademark Office (TMO) has exceptionally extended the opposition term against the trademarks published in this issue to January 30, 2014.
According to the statutory provisions, the opposition period is 3 months from publication date, with no possibility of an extension. However, the purpose of this present exemption is to address the considerable backlog of work that the TMO is currently dealing with. Seeing that the situation in the country is relatively back to normal, the backlog comes as a result of the increased load vis-à-vis the present level of resources. With this extension of time for oppositions, the TMO is obviously trying to stream-line the flow of work in the best possible way. It is not clear how frequently Gazettes will be issued moving forward but we would expect more applications to be examined and published in the near future. We have seen 8 Gazettes so far, ever since the TMO re-opened. In addition to the June issue, an earlier issue was published on May 20, 2013 and 6 other issues were published in December 2013.
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