The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) is a central body based in Alicante, Spain, which administers EU registered trade marks and registered designs, registered IP rights which have effect across the whole of the EU.
Dispute and Facts Munich SL owns an EU registration of 2004 for the following figurative mark: This representation means that the crossed stripes are placed on the side of a shoe. The registration covers ʻSports footwearʼ (class 25). In 2010, Munich SL sued Deichmann SE before the Regional Court of Düsseldorf for the infringement of…
As you may recall from our post on the ‘Sony Vita’ invalidation case, where a trade mark is registered for a product but only used for something viewed by consumers as a different product, the trade mark right for the registered product for which it is not used is lost, even if it resembles the…
On 14 July 2021 the General Court (The Court) issued a decision in a matter between Cole Haan LLC (Cole Haan) and the Danish clothing company Samsøe and Samsøe Holding A/S (Samsøe and Samsøe) in the case T-399/20. The Court found the trademark applied for by Cole Haan consisting of the letter ‘Ø’ from the…
Can coffee be hell? Of course, bad coffee, we knew that. On the other hand, the General Court (GC) has recently confirmed that the sign “HELL” can be protected for coffee-related products as an EU trademark (Hell Energy v EUIPO, T-323/20, available in French and, for the adventurous ones, in Hungarian). The applicant, Hell Energy…
Background On 1st March 2021, an updated version of the EUIPO Guidelines for examination of EU Trade Marks entered into force. Changes can be seen in the ‘track changes’ version. This reveals extensive revision throughout. As these changes are, inter alia, intended to align the Office’s procedures with recent decisions from the Court of Justice…
The crucial date 31 December 2020 has passed and we are now a month into 2021. Even though, in the last two months, the relationship between the UK and the EU had highly dramatic moments, from an IP point of view, things went smoothly and with an incredible velocity, that we would not have predicted,…
On 20 January 2021, the General Court handed down its judgment in the slogan case brought by Oatly AB against the EUIPO’s refusal to register “IT’S LIKE MILK BUT MADE FOR HUMANS” (Case T‑253/20). The General Court sided with Oatly and found that this slogan was sufficiently distinctive to be registered as an EU trademark….
Imagine you file an application for a figurative mark, and EUIPO publishes it. But then your application is opposed by a third party. So while you’re fighting that battle, you file just the word portion of your figurative mark and get a registration. You also file, two further figurative marks containing the same word mark,…
Reason prevailed: on 5 October 2020 (T-602/19), the General Court of the European Union granted the action of Eugène Perma France against the EUIPO and held that the marks NATURALIUM and NATURANOVE could not be considered confusingly similar only because both started in “NATURA”. Surprisingly, both the Opposition Division and the Fourth Board of Appeal…
There are still many IP professionals who are nostalgic of the “good old times” when instead of having to laboriously and meticulously identify the list of goods/services it was sufficient to simply indicate the “class heading” and et voilà you got protection for everything in the class. Yet, there were dangers lurking under this apparent…
