Posts in Europe

Protection of the official names of States and prevention of their registration and use as trademarks have been the focus of attention of the Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications at the World Intellectual Property Organization (the “SCT”) for over six years (since June 2009). Each of the WIPO Member States has both its own national procedures with their peculiarities and some coinciding positions on the subject. Generally speaking, when performing the examination, the competent national authority examines the sign applied for registration as a trademark and consisting of or containing the name of a State in light of formal and substantive legal requirements, like any other sign.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has published its annual World Intellectual Property Indicators. The 2015 report dissects the macro trends associated with filing activity and registrations for 2014 in the following intellectual property areas: patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and plant varieties… The twenty-year era of growth in industrial design patent applications came to an abrupt end in 2014… The decline in global applications stems primarily from the pronounced decrease in resident filings at the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO), which fell 14.9% over the past year.

This decision will continue to have a significant effect on the IP/IT market which has been governed by so many EU Regulations and Directives in the past (albeit not exclusively) that intricately bound the UK to the EU. The UK will in due course enter a negotiation period during which laws will be amended and enacted and international agreements will be negotiated. Due to the required notice period, the actual exit date will not be before 2018. The exact fate of the UK is also still up for debate with many options including retaining membership of the EEA only, or joining EFTA, or having a customs-only arrangement with the EU. The implications of this Brexit are currently very uncertain and will, to a large extent, be determined by the model that would be adopted and the terms of any international agreements negotiated.

As is being widely reported in the general press, the UK has voted to exit the European Union. There are many questions about what this decision means to the global economy, but for the intellectual property systems at least, we see no significant changes in the short term.

As the UK indeed voted for Brexit, the Unitary Patent system will now have to be re-negotiated altogether. The Unitary Patent Regulation states that the Unitary Patent cannot start before the UPC Agreement has been ratified by 13 participating Member States, including the three Member States in which the highest number of European Patents had effect in 2011, i.e. France, Germany and the UK. That alone means that the Unitary Patent must be put on hold now the Brexit referendum has been approved. Indeed, as a non-member of the EU, the UK will not be able to further participate in the Unitary Patent. Without the UK, with its market size and its reputation for patent litigation, the Unitary Patent will lose substantial value.

While the precise details of the terms of a Brexit will be worked out in the coming months and years, businesses likely to be affected by a Brexit should start to identify potential areas of risk and impact and plan staff and customer communications… Overseas businesses often establish operations in the UK as a stepping stone to trading with other EU countries. Government analysis in 2013 found that half of all European headquarters of non-EU firms are in the UK. The vote for a Brexit may affect decisions to establish in the UK and could lead to a relocation of the headquarters of some non-EU firms to other member states.

After a decade of disputes and lobbying, Ukraine has finally joined the countries with special IP courts or patent courts, namely the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Chile, France, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain and others… The reform provides for establishing the High Court on Intellectual Property Issues by autumn 2017 as a court of the first instance for copyright, trademark and patent disputes. Judicial decisions will be reviewed in the court of appeal within the chamber of the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

The major premise of plain packaging is that when stripped of producers’ logos, brand images and promotional matter, tobacco products simply aren’t as attractive to consumers. Reduced focus on logos and images also increases the effectiveness of health warnings. Chan points to research from Australia, the first country to fully implement plain packaging, to show that by stripping tobacco products of gratuitous trademarks and other producer advertising elements, there were 100,000 fewer smokers over the first 34 months after implementation in 2012. Not all groups agree, however.

Google, the Internet software and services arm of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAG:GOOGL), offers a tremendously valuable portal to the wider Internet through its flagship search engine service. One of the more popular aspects of Google’s search engine is the image search features; as of July 2010, Google’s image search was delivering one billion pageviews per day to the company and 10…

A few years ago, a clearly irritated client asked me why European maintenance fees were so expensive. Apparently, he had consulted the EPO schedule of fees and found my recent quote to be much higher than the government fee. The final quote in this case was more than double the government fee, which itself is not a small amount as any practitioner who prosecutes European patent applications knows. I had not realized that the annuity payment firm I was using had slowly increased its rates over the years to an unreasonable level. This started a reflection on how to minimize costs to my clients while still ensuring that the maintenance fees were paid.

After several years of negotiations between the Kosovo government and the European Commission, the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) entered into force on April 1, 2016. The entry into force of the SAA is an important development for Kosovo since this constitutes the first contractual relationship between Kosovo and the European Union. The SAA includes several chapters on various political and economic issues as well as provisions aiming to promote EU standards in many areas, including intellectual property. I will first highlight the main provisions of the SAA concerning IP rights and compare them with the respective provisions in a few other SAAs that the EU signed with other countries in the region. I will then analyze what the entry into force of the SAA means for the Kosovo government in terms of IP protection and how this development will positively affect trademark holders and IP practitioners.

We return to the question we’ve asked throughout our Disaster Tech series: What are the inventive systems being created in order to mitigate the threat to life posed by our world’s greatest cataclysms… Finding new materials which are far more resistant to heat damage than conventional wooden poles was another focus area for HELCO. To generate ideas, HELCO solicited publicly for ideas and ended up designing a new utility pole material with input from teams at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO). That design closely resembled an engineering concept dreamt up by high schoolers at the Hawaii Academy of Arts & Sciences (HAAS), a design which the school submitted to HELCO during the Pahoa lava threat. Both techniques involve wrapping a utility pole with materials having heat resistant and dispersive properties that can stand up to the 2,000°F+ temperatures generated by lava; the HAAS students conceived of a cement sleeve reinforced with rebar and reaching 15 feet in height. Within the sleeve exists a couple of cardboard cylinders which surround a flame retardant foam. The work of the student team was officially recognized by HELCO when they announced the development of its own lava-resistant utility pole design.

Inventors and investors demand a system that affords predictable and durable intellectual property rights in a timely manner. If the system that we implement for granting patent rights does not meet those criteria, inventors will not make use of the system, the public store of knowledge will suffer, and investment in innovative and entrepreneurial domestic enterprises will diminish. Perhaps more importantly, if those rights are not found here, the procurement of intellectual property rights and associated investment and commercialization will move to foreign lands. The result will be lower domestic economic output, fewer jobs, and a decline in American innovation.

Regulators face a twofold challenge: First, they need to balance the legitimate interests of patent holders and licensees in order to determine which activities and contracts the law will enforce, or otherwise recognize as creating legal rights. Second, they need to establish rules that minimize both the costs of assessing a given case, and the costs of taking wrong decisions. One traditional approach has been to use antitrust law.

The new European Community Trade Mark Regulation, as approved by Regulation (EU) 2015/2424 of the European Parliament, entered into force on March 23, 2016. Among other amendments, the provisions of Article 28(8) of the new Regulation substantially change the approach to interpretation of ICGS class headings included in the list of goods/services covered by EU trademarks applied for before June 2012. Previously, before June 22, 2012, a trade mark was deemed to be protected in respect of the entire range of ICGS goods and services included in the alphabetical list for that class provided that such trade mark was registered with reference to the heading of the respective ICGS class.