The body of law drawn from the precedents set by earlier decisions.
Part 1 of this year’s retrospective provided a general overview over the GC case law from 2023 with numbers and a special focus on genuine use cases. Part 2 now focuses on weak marks. The reader is asked for forgiveness for the unusual length of this post… On social media (in particular LinkedIn), one could…
The year is ending and so it is time, once again, to look at what has been coming out of the General Court (GC) over the past 12 months. While the numbers here are only approximate, resulting from searches on the Curia website and on Darts-ip, they do give an idea of what the GC…
In October 2023, the Danish Supreme Court ruled in a trademark case concerning the trademark “TREK”. In recent years the Danish Supreme Court has rarely dealt with trademark disputes (due to the relatively strict requirements of leave from the Appeals Permission Board to appeal a decision to the Supreme Court), making this case particularly interesting….
The parodist could not rely on First Amendment protection because it used the famous sneakers as a source identifier. The maker of a sneaker that parodied a famous brand of skateboard-friendly kicks was not entitled to First Amendment protection against a claim of trademark infringement because it used the trade dress of the original as…
The marks are generic both as to “Carnival” and the geographic locations “St Thomas” and “Virgin Islands.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a lower court decision denying the Virgin Island Carnival Committee (“VICC”) preliminary injunction to enjoin the Virgin Island Department of Tourism from using the phrases “St. Thomas Carnival”…
The murals were merely hidden from public view, not modified or destroyed. A law school that covered up two controversial murals with acoustic panels in order to hide them from public view did not violate the rights of the visual artist who created the murals, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has…
If the third-party marks and opposer’s marks are identical, the opposer’s marks and the applicant’s marks are compared to see if they are identical or non-identical for identical goods or services. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed in part and vacated in part a decision by the Trademark Trial and Appeal…
The trade dress of a wedge-shaped candy, colored to resemble a slice of watermelon, was determined to be functional and not eligible for protection under federal trademark law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a summary judgment decision by a New Jersey district court, ruling that a candy maker could not…
Registrability of Works of Art as Trademarks Recently, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (“EUIPO”) and the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (“HIPO”) have been asked in several cases to examine whether a work of art, in particular a painting, can be registered as a trademark. If a work of art is protected by copyright,…
Using country names as trademarks poses unique challenges, often conflicting with public order. Some countries worldwide have specific provisions in their national legislation for registering country names or letter codes of states as trademarks. The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property as of 1883 safeguards state symbols from unauthorized registration and use as…
