Compliance with the Convention or Protocol implies accession to the “Madrid Union”. As of June 2019 [Update], there will be 104 members from 120 countries. The original treaty has 55 members, all of whom are parties to the protocol (when Algeria acceded to the Madrid Protocol on 31 October 2015, all members of the Madrid Agreement were also members of the Madrid Protocol and many aspects of the Madrid Agreement no longer had practical effect). The term “Madrid Union” can be used to describe legal systems that are either parties to the Agreement or to the Protocol (or both). [4] For example, the protocol makes it possible to obtain an international registration on the basis of a pending trademark application, so that a trademark owner can effectively apply for an international registration at the same time or immediately after filing an application in a member territory. In comparison, the agreement requires that the trademark owner already has an existing registration in a member jurisdiction, which can often take many months and sometimes years. In addition, the agreement does not offer the possibility of “transforming” international registrations that have been “centrally attacked”. The accession of the United States and the European Union to the Madrid Protocol on November 2, 2003 and October 1, 2004, respectively, were two major developments in international trademark law. With the inclusion of these jurisdictions in the protocol, most of the major commercial jurisdictions have joined the Madrid system. On 31 July 2015, Algeria deposited its instrument of accession and will accede to the Madrid Protocol on 31 October 2015. As Algeria was the last member of the Madrid system to have stuck to the Protocol, the Protocol is now in force throughout the Madrid system. [7] In 1966 and 1967, an attempt was made to address this problem by creating a new treaty that would reflect the needs of the time and not the world of the 1890s, when the agreement was adopted.

This led to the drafting of the Trademark Registration Treaty (TRT), adopted in Vienna in 1973 and entered into force in 1980 with five Contracting States, namely Burkina Faso, Congo, Gabon, the Soviet Union and Togo. In the absence of new accessions to the TRT and the low number of registrations recorded since its introduction, it was clear that the TRT was unlikely to replace the Madrid Agreement. The protocol has been operational since 1996 and has 100 members [5], making it more popular than the agreement, which has been in service for more than 110 years and has 55 members. [4] The main reason why the Protocol is more popular than the Agreement is that the Protocol introduced a number of amendments to the Madrid System that have significantly increased its usefulness for trademark owners. . . .