Around the IP blogs

Feeling festive? Come to the MARQUES sub-forum!

MARQUES is participating in the China Trademark Festival 2017, where we are conducting a Sub-Forum. 

The China Trademark Festival 2017 is being held in the Guilin International Conference and Exhibition Center, 22 Lijiang Road, Guilin, Guangxi. The Sub-Forum itself takes place on Sunday 3 September and it lasts all morning (9 am to 12.30 pm, to be precise). The title is "Effective trade mark and brand protection and enforcement strategies from national to regional and going global: brand owners’ needs v legal obligations and available procedural means". 

To learn more about the China Trademark Association and the Festival itself, do please visit the China Trademark Association’s official website here.

The China Trademark Association has generously agreed to apply the special registration fee of USD 650 to all MARQUES members who wish to register for the Festival. The registration form can be found here. For those interested in attending the sub-forum, please contact Alessandra Romeo directly on aromeo@marques.org

Deep in the Guilin, Guangxi, China

Yet another article on the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone

“An extra-terrestrial alien visiting Earth in 2007 and returning, now, one decade later, might, at first glance, notice little difference in smartphones between times.” – Recent new technology deployments with Gigabit LTE at Telstra in Australia, Sprint in the US and EE in the UK highlight how much cellular communications technologies have improved since the introduction of mobile data services with circuit-switched and then packet-switched offerings from around 20 years ago." On the IP finance blog, Keith Mallinson congratulates the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone for its significant successes on innovation and IP protection. 

How art and law can work together beyond the marketplace

In the blog Art & Artifice, a very readable guest post is brought to readers from Sonia K. Katyal and Joan Kee, who recently co-wrote the article "How Art and Law can work together beyond the marketplace" on the role of art law in engaging with the work of minorities. 

Why Are Celebrities Rushing to Trademark Their Children’s Names?

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z are continuing the trend of celebrities looking to legally protect their children’s names in order to either capitalize on them or prevent others from doing so. The music industry power couple registered their daughter’s name Blue Ivy Carter as a European Union trademark back in 2012. They were unable to secure a registration in the U.S., where applicants must prove that they are actually using the mark on goods or services before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will grant a registration.” – Check out the analysis on the Fashion Law blog.

Why was Mother Teresa's uniform trademarked?

“On Monday, news washed up that this "famous" sari of the Nobel laureate nun, who died in 1997, has been trademarked to prevent "unfair" use by people for commercial purposes. India's government quietly recognised the sari as the intellectual property of the Missionaries of Charity in September last year, when the nun was declared a saint by the Vatican” – see the India correspondent Soutik Biswas’s report on BBC. 

Extending reading: IPKat Eleonora formerly provided a commentary here on “Can a colour be considered akin to a shape, so that a sign that consists exclusively of a colour ‘which gives substantial value to the goods’ cannot be registered as a trade mark?”

Patent Prosecution Highway: The Justice ‘Speedy’ League

This month Colombia joined the network of the Global Patent Prosecution Highway (GPPH). This network has 22 members from Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania, and now Latin America. From that side of the pond United States and Canada are members [full list of members can be found here]. Patent applicants who have obtained protection in Colombia may request that the same application be reviewed in any of the other members that are part of the GPPH. This global pilot was launched back in January 2014 allowing ‘patent applicants to request accelerated examination at any of the offices involved in the pilot if their claims have been found to be acceptable by any of the other offices involved in the pilot’.

Photo courtesy of Trey Ratcliff.