The body of law drawn from the precedents set by earlier decisions.
Will the CJEU take a deep dive into the right of possession? The European Court of Justice will have to deal with this question following a reference from the German Federal Supreme Court (Decision of 23 January 2024 in Case I ZR 205/22). The detailed questions which the Court will have to answer are: …
The Fifth Circuit also added non-genuine bezels to the district court’s injunction to make it consistent with the district court’s other findings. In a trademark infringement case involving refurbished Rolex watches, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s judgment insofar as it concluded that BeckerTime, the refurbisher, infringed Rolex’s…
On 25 January 2024 the CJEU issued the long-awaited judgement in the already famous AUDI case (C-334/22). This judgment confirms the possibility of Audi trade mark infringement in terms of the legal interpretation which will be further determined by a national court. The court ruled in AUDI’s favour, stating that a car manufacturer can prohibit…
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…
