Hi Mirjana, hi Dennis, hi Bill, thank you very much for putting together that text. I fully agree that the comments and guidelines from the IP are confusing, in the sense that it's unclear whether visual similarity entails variant relationships or not. In that context, I find the P.S. section one of the most important comments as it summarises our (or at least my) confusion. Maybe we should not have it in the P.S. section but rather as a main section. Another suggestion: should we include the IP's example in our list of examples (i.e., 1E35 vs. 006B) and at the same time add 014D vs. 006F? Then we have a letter with line below and without, as well as a letter with line above and without. I assume the former case is deemed to be a variant for the IP while the latter case is not. Which to me is inconsistent. By adding those two examples we point the IP towards this inconsistency. In case the list of examples gets too large now, I would rather remove some other example than leaving out the two from above. Best regards, Michael -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | knipp | Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH ------- Technologiepark Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 44227 Dortmund Germany Dipl.-Informatiker Fon: +49 231 9703-0 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 Dr. Michael Bauland SIP: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Software Development E-mail: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Register Court: Amtsgericht Dortmund, HRB 13728 Chief Executive Officers: Dietmar Knipp, Elmar Knipp