An infringment action is a legal action brought in the Courts against a party which is infringing the claimant’s intellectual property rights.
According to a recent decision of the Italian Supreme Court, it is no longer possible for an original name ‘proprietor’ to use his or her personal name as a distinctive sign once it has been validly registered as a word mark and has acquired a reputation if it has been validly transferred to a third…
The facts of the case litigated between Gulf Oil Benelux and Milan Vondal before the Prague High Courts prima facie appear to be a typical scenario of a domain name dispute. Yet, the owner of an earlier word mark failed to recover the domain name gulf.cz from his former exclusive distributor despite the domain name…
The Higher District Court of Düsseldorf had to decide whether the parallel importer of medical devices also had to provide the trademark owner at its request with a specimen of the re-labelled product. In its detailed decision of 12 April 2016 on case I-20 U 48/15 the court held that medical devices were rather more…
The Austrian Supreme Court (short “the Court”) denied a motion for a preliminary injunction (short “PI”) against the use of the mark “Duff (BEER)” based on the Claimant’s EUTM “Duff”, since the EUTM could be declared invalid on the basis of Defendant’s earlier German trademark rights (decision of 27.01.2016, 4 Ob 183/15p – DUFF Beer)….
In the Stockholm District Court judgment of March 22, 2016, the UK company Textilis, Ltd (‘Textilis’) was found infringing, amongst others, the Swedish company Svenskt Tenn Aktiebolag’s (‘Svenskt Tenn’) figurative EUTM ‘Manhattan’ (shown below). The case concerned two questions, namely whether (a) there was infringement in Sweden and (b) the trade mark is valid. This case relates…
The UK Court of Appeal recently upheld the High Court’s decision that the use of ‘glee’ by Twentieth Century Fox (‘Fox’) as the name of its comedy TV series infringed an earlier trade mark registration for THE GLEE CLUB. So called ‘wrong way round’ confusion played a central role in this. The claimant (and respondent…
The Portuguese market has been recently overrun by new brands and stores of “low-cost” perfumes. Their business relies on the idea of selling low-cost versions of the original perfumes, identified only by the olfactory families; the business model implicitly and explicitly presupposes that such perfumes are marketed as corresponding to the bestselling perfumes, in terms…
The CJEU in its decision of 4 February 2016 in the ARKTIS case (C-163/15) followed the opinion of Advocate General Wathelet and confirmed that recordal of a license is not a necessary condition for the licensee to be able to bring an infringement action based on a CTM. In our last post (here) we commented…
