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…
As expected, frankly wished for, and previously reported on this blog (see here), the EUIPO appealed the General Court’s Ape Tees decision (T-281/21) to the Court of Justice. The Court allowed this appeal to proceed on 16 November 2022, recognising that the appeal raises issues relating to the fundamental principles of “unity, consistency and development…
Recently we published an article regarding the decision from the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court on blocking of domain names and websites containing trademark infringing material in the matter between Skechers U.S.A., Inc. II (Skechers) and HI3G DENMARK ApS (HI3G) and others (being telecommunications and internet access providers). Read the article here. As written in…
A preliminary injunction did not vacate an earlier arbitration award in a long-running dispute over the trademarked family name. In a dispute between real estate businesses over the name “Singh” and “Singh Michigan” in connection with real estate services, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has denied an appeal to block a preliminary injunction…
EUTM 17981629 in the name of Pest Control Office Limited In May 2021, the Cancellation Division of the EUIPO declared the registration of Banksy’s Monkey image invalid on grounds of bad faith. The trademark owner appealed and on 25 October 2022, the Fifth Board annulled the decision and refused the cancellation action, ruling not…
https://www.top-fashion.sk/moda/made-in-czech-slovakia/5521-nehera-nekonvencna-moda-so-silnym-pribehom https://nehera.com/en Vintage marks – marks that only live on in people’s memories, but not on the market – face the challenge that trademarks that are not used can be cancelled. This conundrum has already been addressed in the earlier post on the CJEU Testarossa judgment. One such vintage mark that gave rise to a…
