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

If you were too busy last week to keep an eye on the IP news, here's the summary of the stories you overlooked:

Trade Marks

Keeping an eye on the IP news.
Photo from SamMino via Pixabay.

This Kat outlined the recent judgment in Société Civile et Agricole du Vieux Château Certan v Kreglinger (Australia) Pty Ltd [2024] FCA 248. A single judge of the Federal Court of Australia held that a Tasmanian wine producer had not passed off its "New Certan" red wine as being connected or associated with the Bordeaux wine estate, Vieux Château Certan. The French wine producer also failed to get the NEW CERTAN trade mark registration cancelled.

Copyright and Designs

Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot discussed the decision of the Court of Appeal of Lyon concerning an iconic model of stool, named “Tam Tam.” The stool had been the subject of a registered design, but the case concerned whether the work of applied art met the originality requirement and had been infringed under copyright law.

Marcel Pemsel evaluated the recent CJEU judgment in The KaiKai Company Jaeger Wichmann GbR (Case C-382/21 P), which held that the Paris Convention does not allow cross-IP priority claims in general. Consequently, applications to register Community designs with the EUIPO could not claim priority based on a PCT patent application more than six months after the filing date of the patent application.

Eleonora Rosati considered the potential copyright issues arising from the picture that was published from the official social media accounts of The Prince and Princess of Wales to mark Mother’s Day, which was ostensibly manipulated by Kate Middleton. The copyright questions abound, including the application of the law on authorship, ownership, originality, infringement, and defences.

Katfriend Nkem Itanyi informed readers about the dispute concerning the movie “Shanty Town” (released on Netflix in 2023). She discusses the issues for joint authorship claims to audiovisual works under Nigerian copyright law, as well as the significance of copyright registration.

Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot also discussed a dispute (Case T‑647/22) that arose after singer and businesswoman, Rihanna, posted photos on Instagram in 2014 to celebrate her appointment as creative director of the Puma brand. In the photos, Rihanna was wearing shoes that, more than 12 months later (i.e. outside the grace period), were the subject of an application to register a Community design. The EU General Court affirmed that the registered design was invalid. 

Patents

An anonymous Katfriend reported on the oral proceedings in the consolidated appeal of the cases on the Broad Institute's European platform patents for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology (T 2360/19, T 2516/19 and T 2689/19). The Enlarged Board of Appeal had previously found (G 1/22 and G 2/22) that there is a strong rebuttable presumption that an applicant of a European patent application is entitled to claim priority. Despite the evidence from the opponents in the triple appeal, the Board accepted the validity of the claimed priorities - we await the written decision to understand why the presumption was not rebutted.

Intellectual Property and Tax

Katfriend Thato Moloto discussed the recent decision from the Tax Court of South Africa about determining the market price at which a parent company would have charged its foreign subsidiaries for the use of intellectual property in market-based arm’s length negotiation.