Around the IP Blogs!

IPKat keeps you up to date with more news and views from around the IP blogosphere!

Case law

Trademarks

Quick off the mark, the MARQUES trademark blog reviews last week’s opinion of the Advocate General on validity of the EUTM “Neuschwanstein”. The Advocate General upheld the General Court’s decision that the State of Bavaria’s EUTM “Neuschwanstein”, a German fairy tale castle and popular tourist attraction, is not descriptive of the goods and services covered by the mark and not therefore not invalid.

MARQUES also posts on the recent CJEU opinion, Red Paralela and others v Orangina Schweppes, concerning the effect of the exhaustion of rights rule of Article 7(1) Trademark Directive on the right of a trademark owner to oppose the importation of goods affixed with the trademark, when the trademark was placed on the goods by an assignee of the trademark in another EEA member state. The CJEU held that the importation of goods bearing the trademark could not be opposed, because the owner had promoted the trademark as a single global trademark. 

Exhausted his rights?

Patents

The Blog of European Patent Law reviews the recent decisions issued by the EPO technical board of appeal (BoA). Highlights include T796/12, in which the BoA considers the admissibility of an appeal filed by a company that was in fact dissolved before the appeal was filed due to bankruptcy, and T1127/14, in which reimbursement of the appeal fee is considered in view of a violation of the right to be heard following modification of the description by the Opposition Division without submission to the Patentee. Also look out for The Blog of European Patent Law's invention of the week!

In the US, IPwatchdog provides an overview of the current US case law concerning the obviousness and anticipation for claims directed to an isolated component of a prior art mixture. Examples of such claims include pharmaceutical products comprising a single enantiomer isolated from a known racemic mixture. The takeaway messages include that for “an isolated component to potentially be vulnerable to an anticipation attack, the anticipatory reference needs to specifically identify and characterize the component, and must teach how to isolate the component”.

Patentylo reports on a reminder from the US Federal Circuit that an inventor who signs an employment agreement providing that an inventor “will assign” rights to inventions, doesn’t mean that she does, in fact, assign them. The issue in this appeal case was whether a co-inventor of a patent transferred her co-ownership interests in the patent under the terms of an employment agreement.

Designs

The MARQUES designs blog analyses the recent Acacia designs cases, in which the CJEU considered the scope of the so-called repair clause (Article 110(1)) of the Community Design Regulation (CDR). The repair clause excludes Community Design protection for designs constituting a component part of a complex product for the purpose of the repair of that complex product. In a decision termed “revolutionary” by MARQUES’s Fabio Angelini, the CJEU ruled that the scope of the repair clause is not limited to component parts of a complex product necessary to the appearance of the protected design, but applies to any component parts of the complex product.

News and opinion

Brazilian patent prosecution can be a bit of a waiting game (discussed by IPKat back in 2015, and IPTango last year). IP watchdog now reports that, to deal with the backlog, the Brazilian Government is considering the emergency measure of automatically granting (without examination) more than 200,000 patent applications.

Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial (INPI), Brazil

IPDebate’s Ashley Cohen considers the effect of the WIPO’s Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances. The Beijing Treaty extends the minimum standards of moral rights provided under the Berne Convention to audiovisual performers. Cohen also considers the difference in the protection of moral rights in US, France and UK. 

Finally, feeling in the need for an overview of the current state of copyright law? The 1709 Blog’s CopyKat, provides!

Author: Rose Hughes