In February this year a dispute between the law firm FOCUS Advokater (“FOCUS Lawyers” in English) and the accounting firm Beierholm was decided by the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court (BS-40894/2019 SHR). The case concerned the use of the name BEIERHOLM FOKUS which FOCUS Advokater found to be an infringement of their trademark rights…

In a recent ruling from 15 August 2019 (BS-6392/2019 SHR) the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court found that the conditions for issuing a preliminary injunction against the clothing company Message A/S (Message) had not been fulfilled since the alleged infringement did not constitute a sufficient basis for issuing a preliminary injunction. According to the…

A trademark registration of a color per se is notoriously difficult to achieve, but what about the name of a color? In two recent decisions from the Danish Board of Appeal (BOA) regarding the registration of the words MAGENTA and CREAM respectively, the question regarding the descriptiveness of color designations was the main issue. In…

In the beginning of this year a decision regarding the trademark right to the name of the iconic Danish faience set with the thin blue line on the edges, was issued by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court (Decision no. BS.9705/2017-SHR of 18 January 2019). Both the designer of the faience set as pictured here,…

In a recent decision from 1 October 2018 (B-2740-17) the Danish Eastern High Court affirmed a decision of the Danish Commercial Court from December 2017 (V-8-17) in which the court had ruled that a café in Copenhagen had infringed the trademark rights and copyrights to the character Obelix which rightfully belongs to Les Editions Albert…

On the 21 March 2018 the Danish Board of Appeal (“The Board”) delivered its decision regarding the trademark protection of the shape of the following potato snack (decision no. AN 2017 00006): The snack originates from the famous snack brand Kims which is owned by Orkla Confectionary & Snack Danmark A/S (“Orkla”). In the decision…

Already, back in 1983 the Danish Government decided to create a national debit card named ‘DanKort’. Today the DanKort is usually combined with a Visa card and functions as a credit card abroad. The right to issue DanKort currently belongs to Nets Denmark A/S (‘Nets’), and the DanKort-logo is protected as a trademark and looks…

In a previous post we explored the potential disadvantages of failing to utilise the registered community design (“RCD”) in a Danish context. By contrast, this post will examine the possibilities of enforcement when a product is not protected as a RCD but as an unregistered community design (“UCD”). Further, this post will demonstrate how the…

This is the final part of the two-part blog on estoppel which will focus on relevant case law where estoppel is essential to the result of the case. You can read the first part of the blog which deals with the theory of estoppel here. As is evident from the case law below, the establishment…

Increasingly, it seems that complex trademark cases are not always decided on the basis of trademark law and EUTMR alone but also on the basis of general legal principles, such as estoppel (in Danish “passivitet”), and much less often acquiescence. We have written two blogs on the subject seen from a Danish perspective. This first…