As of 07 December 2015, the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) and the Institute for Intellectual Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina (IIP-BIH) have made their trade mark data available to the TMview search tool. ARIPO’s member states are Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe (a total of 19 member states). The increasing cooperation and involvement of OHIM with African countries is an important strategic step.
The integrations of ARIPO and IIP-BIH are concrete results of the International Cooperation programme managed by OHIM in collaboration with its international partners.
With ARIPO and IIP-BIH on-board, TMview now contains data from 53 participating offices. With the addition of about 25.000 trade marks in total from ARIPO and IIP-BIH, TMview now provide information and access to more than 34,6 million trade marks in total. Since the introduction of TMview on 13 April 2010, the tool has served more than 16,9 million searches from 151 different countries, with Spain, Germany and Italy among the most frequent users. You can find out more at www.tmview.org