Never Too Late: If you missed the IPKat last week!

If you've been stretched thin lately and haven't kept up with the IP news, here's the summary of what you missed.

Trade Marks and GIs

This Kat has been stretched thin too.
Image from Pexels.

Marcel Pemsel discussed the latest in plant-based trade marks with the General Court decision that 'MYBACON' (for fungi-based meat substitutes) was of such a nature as to deceive the public. The court was not convinced that consumers would recognise the prefix 'MY' as referring to 'mycelium' and 'myco', a prefix meaning 'fungi'.

Anastasiia Kyrylenko commented on the decision of AFNIC (the French country-code top-level domain name registrar) to transfer 'porcelainefrancaisedelimoges.fr' to the owners of the French geographical indication (GI) ‘Porcelaine de Limoges’, even though the domain name was registered before the GI.

Patents and Plant Varieties

Rose Hughes discussed a recent American case, K-fee v Nespresso.  The case addressed the well-established US principle of file wrapper estoppel and confirmed that prosecution history from other jurisdictions (in this case, the European file history) could be used to narrow the meaning of a term in the patent claims.

This Kat reviewed the decisions from the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione last year, which clarified how the IP office should approach the assessment of novelty and distinctness of plant varieties where the application for protection was made after the relevant priority period had expired.

Copyright

Eleonora Rosati informed readers about the upcoming event on 1 February at Fordham Law School, NYC, entitled 'Transatlantic Dialogue on Copyright and the Court of Justice of the European Union'. There's lots of great speakers on the agenda (including Eleonora Rosati herself). Readers can find details and registration here.