ECJ REJECTS APPEALS BY KWS SAAT, OHIM


The IPKat has espied two fresh trade mark decisions, delivered by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) only a couple of hours ago. They are

* Case C-447/02 P KWS Saat AG v OHIM . KWS Saat applied to register as a Community trade mark the colour orange for seeds, treatments for seeds and for forestry products (Classes 7, 11 and 31). OHIM and the Court of First Instance (CFI) rejected the application: the colour was devoid of distincctive character for those products, since it was neither original nor even unusual for them. KWS Saat appealed to the ECJ, which today dismissed that appeal. The grounds of appeal were procedural and the judgment contains no striking statements of new law. However, the decision shows that it is a waste of time to try to persuade the ECJ that the CFI has applied a stricter test of distinctiveness for the applicant's colour mark than for is applied to non-colour marks when all the CFI has basically done is to apply the principles enunciated by the ECJ in its earlier ruling (also, incidentally, relating to the colour orange) in Case 104/01 Libertel.

* Case C-64/02 Erpo Möbelwerk GmbH v OHIM. This time the appeal came from OHIM, incensed that the CFI should have allowed the registration as a Community trade mark of the slogan DAS PRINZIP DER BEQUEMLICHKEIT (German for "The Principle of Comfort") for various classes of goods, including furniture. The ECJ concluded that the CFI reached its decision that the sign was registrable without applying more lenient criteria of distinctiveness than those stipulated by the ECJ in its earlier case law. Strangely, the ECJ did not cite any of its big decisions on the distinctiveness of word marks (BABY-DRY, CHIEMSEE, DOUBLEMINT, POSTKANTOOR, BIOMILD), preferring to state its position as stated in recent 3-D trade marks cases involving detergent tablets. OHIM did win one small battle, though. The ECJ held, at para.46, that
"by holding ... that a trade mark is not devoid of distinctive character within the meaning of Article 7(1)(b) of Regulation 40/94 unless it is demonstrated that the phrase concerned is commonly used in business communications and, in particular, in advertising – the existence of such a situation not having been established in the contested decision – the Court of First Instance applied a criterion other than the one laid down by Article 7(1)(b) of Regulation 40/94".
This wasn't sufficient to get the ECJ to overturn the CFI's ruling, since there were so many other grounds upon which it could have been justified.

The IPKat feels that ECJ jurisprudence on distinctive character is finally starting to stabilise and become more predictable, at long, long last ...

Principles of comfort here; Southern comfort here; affordable comfort here.
ECJ REJECTS APPEALS BY KWS SAAT, OHIM ECJ REJECTS APPEALS BY KWS SAAT, OHIM Reviewed by Jeremy on Thursday, October 21, 2004 Rating: 5

1 comment:

  1. online, free of charge! It doesn’t matter if your enterprise is a purely online or offline venture,

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.