Around the IP Blogs

One week is over and the next one has just begun. Perfect timing to take a look at what the surrounding blogs have posted over the past few days!

"Cat in the Box" by admiller is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

TRADE MARKS

The impact of Brexit on trade mark cases involving UK-based rights has been a hot topic over the past two years. But for how long will UK-based rights continue to play a role in deciding EU trade mark disputes? In two judgments (Basmati, T-342/20 - which we reported on some time ago - and APE TEES, T-281/21), the General Court found that they are relevant (the cases were decided in October 2021 and March 2022, respectively). In the Basmati case (which is subject to an appeal to the ECJ and has not yet been decided), the ECJ commented that the case is "important in terms of the unity, consistency and development of EU law". The Kluwer Trademark Blog provides a summary of the background and outcome of the above decisions.

In 2021, the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) launched the IP Register in Blockchain, laying the foundation for a distributed platform that will enable services that benefit from a secure, fast and direct connection between IP offices and rights holders. As reported by MARQUES, the project was awarded first prize in the "best application of tech in the public sector" category at the 2022 Global Business Tech Awards.

COPYRIGHT

As reported by the Kluwer Copyright Blog, last week the European Commission sent reasoned opinions to 13 Member States (Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden) for failing to notify the Commission of implementing measures on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market (Directive (EU) 2019/790). The Commission urges the above Member States to fully transpose the Directive into national law, for which the transposition deadline was June 2021.

Can a slogan be protected by copyright? The Kluwer Copyright Blog reports on a recent Italian Supreme Court decision addressing this question.

As reported by The Fashion Law, a recent case in China involved copyright infringement of a series of illustrated works by Chinese artist Ma Qianli and the contributory liability of Chinese marketplace Bigverse. The case involved infringing non-fungible tokens offered on the online marketplace and resulted in one of the country's first judgments on NFTs and copyright infringement through an online intermediary.

PATENTS

Last week, UCL Laws and Taylor Wessing organized the Patents in Telecoms & the Internet of Things conference in London, which focused on the topic of licensing standard-essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The IP Finance Blog has written a detailed report on many of the issues raised at the event.

The dispute between Epic Games and Apple (which we already briefly reported on) continues with a new development. In the antitrust appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Epic Games has filed its reply brief and Foss Patents has reported on it.