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…
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…
Following a request for cancellation, the Federal Patent Court decided to cancel a shape mark for sweets arguing that it exclusively consisted of a shape necessary to obtain a technical result (Decision of the Federal Patent Court of 27 December 2016 on Case 25 W (pat) 59/14). The cancellation request was directed against the German…
The Spanish Supreme Court has held that there is no risk of confusion between the word trade mark “Toro” (owned by Osborne Group, S.A., the notorious beverage company) and the word trade mark “Badtoro” (owned by Jordi Nogués, S.L., and filed for goods and services in classes 25 and 35 – relating to clothing-). Firstly,…
