The district court applied the wrong legal standard for secondary meaning by requiring evidence of specific association rather than a single, anonymous source. In a trademark case between two competing companies that sell oversize Connect 4 games, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has held that a trial is needed to decide trade…
No doubt that it is difficult to come by a registration to a single colour – especially in Denmark. Only two existing registrations for a single colour are in effect currently. One owned by Grundfos Management A/S to for circulating pumps in Class 7 and the other, the most recent single colour registration is from 2022,…
This is the Kluwer Blog Team wishing all our readers a Happy New Year – and providing the by now traditional yearly review of Luxembourg cases. 2022 was again a busy year for the courts in Luxembourg. The EUIPO Case Law search tool lists 283 decisions in trademark and 13 in designs handed down by…
Another high-profile Louboutin case, although this time it’s less about the protection of the red sole as such than the liability of online retail platforms. The Court of Justice (CJEU) handed down a preliminary ruling in a case involving Christian Louboutin on the one hand and Amazon on the other, one referred from Luxembourg and…
The Higher Regional Court Frankfurt (OLG Frankfurt) held in its decision 6 U 40/22 of June 2, 2022 that the imprint of a commonly known verb on the front of a garment would be perceived as a descriptive term by the public. This led the Court to decide that the word had not been used…
Intellectual property law is designed to confer exclusive protections to intangible assets, to be used in compliance with honest commercial practices. In the absence of a statutory definition of what constitutes bad faith, a body of case law has been necessary to illuminate the threshold of behavioural demerit sufficient to disqualify owners from the benefits…
Not many cases make it to the Grand Board of Appeal of the EUIPO. The ICELAND cases did, including the first oral hearing ever before the Grand Board attracting lots of attention. There has been a policy discussion for quite some time regarding the registrability of country names as trademarks, and the ICELAND cases…
Read up on the latest news reported by the Kluwer IP Reporter here. Cape Verde implements Harare, Banjul Protocols On 14 October 2022, the Harare Protocol and the Banjul Protocol came into effect in The Republic of Cape Verde, thus it became the 20th contracting State of the Harare Protocol and the 13th contracting State…
genuine use of an EU trademark within the EU for services provided outside the EU a summary of decision T‑768/20 of the General Court of the EU The background of this decision was an application for revocation for non-use against the EUTM owned by Standard International Management LLC, a US company. Yes, this is…
A judgment of the General Court demonstrates the controversial and problematic nature of retail services marks. The ALDI/ALDIANO Case The case concerns Aldi, the discount chain. An Aldi entity (in the following “Aldi”) filed an application for the declaration of invalidity against the EUTM ALDIANO, registered for “alcoholic beverages (except beers)” (class 33). Aldi relied…
