Around the IP Blogs!

As the first day of spring has sprung its blossoms around the IP blogland, The IPKat is in search of some inspiration! A bouquet of interesting judgements, announcements and overviews were on offer last week! Enjoy a nice portion of katfood, Kat friends!

Practising Intellectual Property Law

For the Research Blog Series, Jose Bellido presents an oral history project collecting interviews with retired barristers, solicitors, civil servants, activists and academics, involved with intellectual property law. Check out CREATe for an interview with the author and here is the full story!

Trade Marks and Domain Names

German Federal Patent Court confirms broad protection of company and trade names against trade marks in Germany: Sascha Abrar of the Kluwer Trademark Blog discusses the case decided last January concerning the trade mark EBERTH, where the Court held that also the owner of a senior company name can take action against the use of a trade mark by a third party.

Marques Class 46 informs of a notice issued by the European Commission that .eu TLD will no longer apply to UK after Brexit. The notice is addressed to undertakings and organisations that are established in the United Kingdom and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom, who as of the UK withdrawal date will no longer be eligible to register or renew .eu domain names.

Kluwer Trademark Blog reflects on a recent CJEU judgment in the matter of Peek & Cloppenburg, a referral from the German Supreme Court in a dispute between two German companies of the same name (one of which runs under the name of Peek & Cloppenburg KG Düsseldorf, the other of Peek & Cloppenburg KG, Hamburg) (C‑148/17).  The CJEU decided that, in the context of a later invalidity or revocation action brought against a national mark that has been surrendered or allowed to lapse, the conditions for cancellation of the mark are to be assessed only as at the time of the surrender or expiry of that mark.

Patents

Getting the priorities right

Patently-O analyses the Federal Circuit decision in Droplets, Inc. v. E*Trade Bank (Fed. Cir. 2018), whereby the court held that the patent at issue was invalid as obvious unless it properly claimed priority back to its provisional application, i.e. the full chain of priority.

EPLAW casts an eye onto The UK Court of Appeal judgement, which has upheld the High Court’s decision that one of two patents owned by Boston Scientific Scimed Inc. relating to replacement heart valves was invalid, and the other valid and infringed by Edwards Lifesciences companies. The case highlights the flexibility of the rule on the use of cross-examination in giving a witness the opportunity to explain any contradiction or alleged problem with his evidence. As Floyd LJ determines in this judgement, “procedural rules such as this are the servants of justice and not the other way round.”

Copyright

Kluwer Copyright Blog brings a commentary on the press publishers’ right, which has been proposed by the European Commission in the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in 2016 and which, since then, has attracted extensive discussion. Author analyses the new right through the prism of a ‘right to published editions’ introduced in the UK Copyright Act 1956, Australian Copyright Act 1968 and some other countries.

The 1709 Blog updates its readers on Microsoft’s suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee against Community Health Systems for willful copyright infringement through unlicensed use of Microsoft’s software and breach of its contractual obligations, and implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

Trust in IP offers an overview of the so-called “Pay-tv” case and a subtle attempt of the European Commission to use it as means to reform copyright law through competition enforcement.

The 2018 World Cup is rapidly approaching and so are the spin-off businesses of paraphernalia and so on associated with it. In all of this growing play, one company was given a red card by the Peruvian Copyright Commission for copyright infringement: the photos included in the “World Cup Russia 2018” album were not covered by a licence, hence the sanction. Patricia Covarrubia of IP Tango  tells us more in Copyright infringement by a sticker album: Stick that!

Image credits: Nathan Adams