On 31 May 2023, the Patent Office joined the IP Register in Blockchain project of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), thereby supplementing the IP Register in Blockchain network with information on trademarks and designs registered in Latvia.
By joining the IP Register in Blockchain network, Latvia has become the seventh project member, adding over sixty-eight thousand registered trademarks and over three thousand designs to the network.
The other project participants are EUIPO, Malta, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Italy.
Implementing the project ensures that data added to the IP Register in Blockchain platform is stored automatically in the EUIPO’s trademark database "TMview" and designs database "DesignView", laying the foundation for new innovative services such as "TMview and DesignView History".
Blockchain is a collective term for technologies designed to synchronize data stored on different computers or servers anywhere in the world using a network in a way that allows this data to remain unchanged. Data is divided into blocks, where each block depends on the previous and the successive ones, creating transparent and correct information that is almost impossible to alter unnoticed.
This distributed database is synchronized in a single chain, where each data record or block is stored on multiple computers or servers, saving current and historical changes in each block. To ensure the integrity of the data content, a uniform protocol is used, where cryptography plays an important role.