What are the “classes” of a trademark?

The goods and services of a trademark define its scope of protection, so in order to file an application for registration or for example to carry out a prior search, it is necessary to know precisely what are/will be the goods and services that will be marked by the mark in question, on the basis of the Nice Classification, that will be the subject of the application and will define its scope of protection.

In order to register a trademark, member countries of the Nice Agreement are obliged to apply the Nice Classification and to indicate the number of classes and/or precise subclasses of the classification to which the goods and services for which the marks are filed belong, in the official documents and publications concerning their marks.

We point out that the list of goods and services covered by the trademark application cannot be expanded but only limited.

In addition to the Nice Classification, there are other classifications used for specific purposes or in specific geographic areas such as the Vienna Classification, which is used to classify figurative marks, that is marks mainly consisting of graphic elements, such as images, drawings or symbols. This classification categorizes trademarks based on specific graphic elements, such as lines, dots, shapes, colours, shadows, etc.