At present, the Fiji Trademarks Act was implemented in 1933 and was based on the UK Trademarks Act of 1905. It has broadly remained unchanged ever since. The biggest issue for modern practitioners is Fiji not being a member of the Nice Agreement, meaning it does not use the International Classification of Goods and Services. Instead, it uses a version of the 1938 British Classification system – a system that is particularly dated in 2021 (it has only 50 different goods classes and 10 subclasses, no service classes, and some archaic categorisations, such as Fijian class 22 being for ‘carriages’ and Fijian class 8 being for ‘philosophical instruments’).That is now set to change. At the end of August 2021, the new Fijian Trademarks Act 2021 was gazetted, with a commencement date set to be announced soon. It is understood the new law is similar to the New Zealand Trademarks Act 2002 (which itself is similar to the Singapore Trademarks Act 1998 and the United Kingdom Trademarks Act 1994), although differences are expected when the full act is published in due course.
