Each brand is registered for certain goods and / or services, depending on your products / services. After that, the scope of protection of the German trademark is determined. The goods and services are divided into 45 classes according to an internationally standardized system, the Nice Classification.
The 45 classes (34 for goods, 11 for services) are based on the Nice classification. The Nice classification includes internationally defined lists of certain goods and services, which comprise a total of around 10,000 terms. In order to provide an overview of the contents of all classes, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) issues a PDF file of a list of recommendations for classifying goods and services. The alphabetical lists of Nice are not exhaustive, rather they give users hints or indications of the classes in which certain goods and services are to be grouped; in practice, however, they are often not sufficient to represent all goods and services in a certain class that users request.
For trademark registrations at the DPMA: Use TMclass to create your lists of goods and services. If only terms of goods and services and / or group titles from the uniform classification database (TMclass) are used, the list of goods and services does not require any further clarification. The DPMA will process the application faster.
For this reason, the DPMA, together with the Office of the European Union for Intellectual Property (EUIPO) and the other national trademark offices in Europe, has developed a classification database that, in addition to the alphabetical lists of the Nice classification, has a significantly larger number of harmonized and accepted in the EU Terms of goods and services. The terms in this database are based on the needs of the markets or specific industries, but also take into account the registration principles and principles of the national trademark offices and the EUIPO. As part of the creation process of the TMclass database, it was also possible to harmonize the classification practices of the individual national trademark offices and to largely harmonize them within the EU. For trademark applicants, these harmonized terms are made available via a database with the international name “Harmonized Database” (HDB), which is made available via the common platform of the harmonized offices “TMclass“. In the German-speaking world, this database is referred to as the “einheitliche Klassifikationsdatenbank” (eKDB).