After some 10 years, the Lambretta saga has finally come to an end, but it might not really matter that much… anymore. LAMBRETTA is a famous vintage brand for scooters, which has been acquired by Scooters India Ltd (yet another famous European vehicle brand that has landed in India). While the scooters as such have not…
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. World of Warcraft takes place within the fantasy Warcraft world of Azeroth. Alone or together with others the player has to solve quests in order to level up and have more possibilities. Since some of these quests…
In the latest judgement of the General Court (hereafter GC) on Geographical Indications (hereafter GIs or GI) T 510/15 TOSCORO (versus the GI TOSCANO) the mark applied for was declared partially invalid. In the European Union (hereafter EU) GIs for wine, spirits, agricultural products and foodstuffs are protected as sui generis intellectual property rights that…
The Swedish Patent and Market Court (the “PMD”) has, on appeal from the Swedish Patent- and Registration Office, invalidated the registration of a trademark containing, among others, the words “Taxi” and “Stockholm” because of the earlier mark “Taxi Stockholm”. By way of background it must be noted that the taxi services in Sweden is not…
To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from January and February 2017. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
The federal district court in San Diego did not err in ruling on summary judgment that Seal Shield LLC failed to establish that its predecessor had used the mark LIFE PROOF in commerce in connection with electronic device covers before Otter Products’ subsidiary TreeFrog Developments applied to register LIFEPROOF, the U.S. Court of Appeals in…
We all know that acquiescence is an absolute defense against infringement which occurs when a proprietor of an earlier mark has acquiesced, for a period of five successive years, to the use of a later registered trademark while being aware of such use. However, neither EU nor Italian (or, to our knowledge, any other national) trademark…
Proving infringement in France has become just that wee bit more perilous after the Supreme Court’s decision of 25th January 2017. Saisie-contrefaçon, pioneered in France back in 1991 is still widely used to obtain material evidence of infringement that may be located in premises that are private, such as a company’s warehouse or showroom. However,…
Nvidia Corp v Hardware Labs (GTX) [2016] EWHC 3135 Ch For manufactures of steam engines in the late 19th century, tactics of systematically threatening to sue your competitors’ customers for infringement of intellectual property rights were fair game. Nowadays, businesses in the UK have to contend with the laws on unjustified threats which prohibit such…
Apple Inc.’s International Registration No 1152788 for the mark “IPAD MINI” was provisionally refused in Switzerland in 2014. The Swiss Trademark Office (IPI) considered that the mark was descriptive of the nature of the products in Class 9 (“Handheld mobile digital electronic device comprising a tablet computer […]). It argued that it would be immediately…
