BIOKNOWLEDGE NOT REGISTRABLE FOR BIOKNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

On Wednesday the European Court of Justice's Court of First Instance (CFI) dismissed the appeal of Proteome (Case T-387/03, Proteome Inc. v Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market) to register the word BIOKNOWLEDGE as a Community trade mark for

– Class 9: ‘Databases, in physical and electronic form, providing information relating to organisms, and computer software for use in searching, retrieving, compiling, organising, managing, analysing, communicating and/or integrating data in and among repositories of information in electronic form, including computer databases’;

– Class 16: ‘Printed material, including guides and manuals, concerning repositories of information relating to organisms’;

– Class 42: ‘Information and computer services, namely developing and/or providing access to databases containing information relating to organisms, and computer software related thereto’.

The application was dismissed on the grounds that the mark was both devoid of distinctive character for those goods and services and that it was comprised exclusively of terms that described them: see Regulation 40/94, Art.7(1)(b) and (c). The OHIM Board of Appeal dismissed Proteome's appeal and a further appeal was lodged with the CFI. The CFI dismissed the appeal, rightly holding (in the IPKat's opinion) that the word was descriptive and that BIOKNOWLEDGE could not be described as a syntactically unusual juxtaposition of the prefex "bio-" and the word "knowledge".