5.4. Regulated signs

The use of certain signs or signs resembling them, other than by an authorised body, is prohibited in Australia under a number of laws.  The main source of prohibited signs is the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva.  These signs are prohibited under Article 6ter of the Paris Convention for the protection of Industrial Property.

Prohibited and prescribed signs are neither applications nor registrations.

They are indexed in a similar way to ordinary ‘commercial’ trade marks and are searchable on our Australian Trade Mark Search database, however indexing is performed on a different database using a negative number sequence in the -9000000 range. This is done to make sure that a search on the relevant indexing constituents will bring the sign to the attention of the searcher.

4.1 Capturing and Indexing Prohibited and Prescribed signs

WIPO publishes these types of signs on 31 March and 30 September each year.

Once identified, each prohibited sign will be indexed using the images/words from the WIPO database, be given a -9000000 number and captured in RIO.  

Each record needs to contain:

• A -9000000 number
• Image/s (if applicable)
• Word/s (if applicable)
• Indexing terms (same as is done for trade marks)
• The following comments in the Indexing Comment field: WIPO Article 6ter number(s) xxxx, dd.mm.yyyy​​​​​​​