2. The Chairman recalled that he had prepared the report in TN/IP/20 for the purposes of the TNC's stocktaking exercise, on his own responsibility, after having consulted the whole Membership. In Part II concerning "Future Work", he had made several suggestions, which had largely been welcomed by delegations. In particular, he had suggested the so-called "3-4-5 approach": "three" stood for the three clusters of issues identified by Ambassador Manzoor Ahmad in 2008 and reflected in paragraph 6 of TN/IP/20; "four" stood for the four questions posed in October 2009 by Ambassador Trevor Clarke regarding legal effects/consequences of registration, participation and special and differential treatment and reflected in paragraph 7 of TN/IP/20; and "five" stood for the so-called "five guiding principles" for future work suggested by Ambassador Clarke and reflected in paragraph 8 of TN/IP/20. The Chairman had indicated in paragraph 12 of TN/IP/20 that he did not exclude the possibility of putting forward more questions as the Special Session progressed in the discussions in order to keep the negotiations on the right track. It was also his impression that the two key issues to tackle were legal effects/consequences of registration and participation, but that the first one, legal effects/consequences, was the stumbling block. He had further suggested in his report that in the future Members' technical discussions should build upon the work already done, focusing on substantive issues, including in particular the question of the implications of a register entry: how did national or domestic trademark and GI authorities operate their systems and how would their way of operation be affected by different proposed ways of "taking account" of information on the register.
3. Pursuant to the work programme for negotiating groups for the period of April-July 2010, he had held a series of informal consultations in early June, in which delegations had shared their views on how to organize the work of this meeting. For the purpose of transparency and inclusiveness, he had shared the outcome of these consultations with the whole membership in an open-ended informal meeting on 9 June.
4. As discussed in his informal consultations, it was his intention that work in this formal meeting should focus on legal effects/consequences of registration, in particular, how Members' authorities dealing with trademarks and geographical indications operated and how their way of operation might be affected by different proposed ways of "taking account" of the information on the register. To that end, he had circulated on 4 June two sub-questions on legal effects/consequences of registration, i.e. questions under the chapeau of the two Chairman's questions of October 2008 on legal effects/consequences. His two sub-questions had been made available in all three WTO languages the previous afternoon.1
5. With respect to the first sub-question he said that, while he recalled that some delegations had already explained how information was taken into account in domestic or national proceedings, only a few had pronounced themselves on whether or not taking information into account was a legal obligation, and whether a new source of information would automatically be covered by such an obligation in, say, a country's trademark examiner's guidelines.
6. With respect to the second sub-question, he said that, in light of previous exchanges on that issue, Members might find it useful to discuss how the issue of genericness was currently raised and treated in certain procedural situations at the national or domestic level. Responses to that question could bring out whether or not genericness claims had to be substantiated and who bore the burden of proving it in current practice.
7. He said that those sub-questions were intended to be a starting point for Members' technical discussions about national or domestic practices. While other additional sub-questions might certainly be useful in the future to address further aspects of the three clusters of issues, he invited Members at this point to address those two sub-questions, in order to focus on the "stumbling block" of legal effects/consequences of registration. He also wished to make clear that any other means by which Members might have intended to share information about their systems at this meeting, such as case studies, scenarios or presentations, remained most welcome and that delegations wishing to address any other issues, including participation and special and differential treatment, should feel free to do so.
