Around the IP Blogs

This Kat is taking a moment
to smell the flowers

Sumer is icumen in, and so has this latest roundup of what's new around the IP blogs.

Copyright

The Kluwer Copyright Blog published a summary of Article 17-related developments in the past year, which may be of interest to Kat readers keeping an eye on the CDSM Directive.

In relation to a copyright infringement suit filed before the District Court, Trivandrum, against Facebook India, which also alleges violation of moral and posthumous celebrity rights, Spicy IP considered the various factors at play before the court.

Patents

The biggest news in the patent blogosphere last week was the German Federal Constitutional Court's decision rejecting all outstanding constitutional complaints against the proposed Unified Patent Court, removing a major hurdle to the initiative's realisation. See coverage on FOSS Patents, JUVE Patent, Legal Patent, and the Kluwer Patent Blog - and, of course, the IPKat - for more.

Over on Comparative Patent Remedies, Thomas Cotter commented on the UK Supreme Court's recent "well-reasoned" decision in Secretary of State for Health v. Servier Laboratories Ltd. [2021] UKSC 24, concerning a claim for damages after the revocation of a pharmaceutical patent which had allegedly been obtained on the basis of false representations.

Writing from Munich, this Kat was interested to see JUVE Patent's report that the Munich Regional Court is now challenging better-established patent courts such as Düsseldorf, with its recent increase in cases bucking a declining trend elsewhere in Germany.

Trade marks

In the first judgment on sound marks at EU level since their introduction in 2017, the General Court deemed the sound mark 'tin plop' (Dosen Plopp) to be devoid of distinctive character, in line with the opinions of both the original trademark office decision and the Board of Appeal, with Legal Patent providing a summary of the issues at hand.

Timberland has been producing its iconic boots for nearly fifty years, attempting however only in the past several years to acquire trade dress protection for the design in the US. PatentlyO provided an overview of the company's latest lawsuit at district court level.

Other

IPTango reported on the recent founding of the Latin American Network of IP and Gender with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between INAPI (Chile), INDECOPI (Peru), RN (Costa Rica), SIC (Colombia) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, as an honorary member).