IP Australia conducting trials for Smart Trade Marks
10 June 2020
IP Australia is conducting trials for its Smart Trade Marks, a tool that helps distinguish authentic products and services from counterfeit items in the online space.
“This is a new service aiming to increase consumer confidence in Australian brands by helping identify authentic goods and services in online marketplaces. This tool allows trademark owners to connect digitally to the government register to prove they are the authentic owner of a brand,” says Graeme Jones, acting chief information officer of IP Australia.
The office, the first fully digital service delivery agency in the Australian government, is conducting the trials with industry and government partners. IP Australia hopes to make Smart Trade Marks available soon.
“Add to this a number of innovative initiatives including Trade Mark Assist and Australian Designs Search platforms and you can see that we are modernising our customer experience in a number of ways to meet the expectations of our customers,” says Jones.
The agency embarked on digital transformation several years ago, resulting in these and several other innovations including the Transactional Digital Services (TDS) program. TDS reduces complexity, cuts the regulatory burden and opens the IP services market to new business models. The program also enables customers to onboard and transact using new APIs in less than two weeks.
Another is the Rights in One program which involves a global best practice AI search capability for customers to streamline the administration of IP rights.
Meanwhile, the Australian Trade Mark Search uses trademark image recognition and search technologies. IP Australia was one of the first IP offices in the world to do so.
Jones adds their tools and services are working for their customers without interruption even in the ongoing pandemic.
“Having already proactively invested in our digital tools, more than 99% of our customer transactions are done digitally,” he says. “This means we were well positioned to continue to meet our customers’ needs during this period.”
With the ongoing trials for Smart Trade Marks, Jones says IP Australia continues on this trail of digitization while maintaining customer confidence and delivery of IP Rights administration.
