Europe's highest court recently gave a decision in a trade
mark case that deals with the technical, yet highly important,
issue of trade mark classifications and class headings. Before
discussing the ruling, some background is in order.
A trade mark is registered for particular goods or services,
basically those goods or services for which the trade mark owner
uses or intends to use the mark. Goods and services are
categorised in 45 different classes (34 goods classes, 11 service
classes), in terms of something known as the Nice
Classification. Each class has a heading, and in some cases
that heading gives a pretty good indication of exactly what goods
or services are covered by the class, but in other cases it's
somewhat obscure. In addition, there's an
alphabetical list of goods and services that comprises some
12 000 entries, so if you want to find out what class a particular
product falls into, you simply look it up in the alphabetical list
and you have your
