LATEST REPORTED EUROPEAN TRADE MARK CASES

The April 2004 issue of Sweet & Maxwell's European Trade Mark Reports has now been published, a little ahead of time. This issue leads with the Danish Supreme Court decision in Paranova v Boehringer Ingelheim on the application of the doctrine of necessity to various forms of repackaging of parallel traded pharma products, including "one-to-one" repackaging and "window labels". Other important decisions reported include

• the OHIM Third Board of Appeal decision in Karl Fazer v USP Brands that Finland is not a substantial part of the European Community;

• two meaty WIPO Arbitrations, one on the legality of a parma-schinken.com website from which both PARMA ham and other products were sold, the other on whether the use of britishmeat.org is objectionable, given that the BRITISH MEAT trade mark was a figurative one, not a word mark;

• the Court of First Instance decision in Unilever v OHIM on the registrability of speckled tablets.

Next month the ETMR runs its special INTA issue, in which some of the juiciest trade mark cases are reported.

If you come across any interesting trade mark case that you'd like to see reported, wherever in Europe it comes from, please don't hesitate to contact the IPKat's masters, Jeremy and Ilanah (who are the Editor and Deputy Editor of the ETMR respectively) here.