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Monday miscellany

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

It's enough to make| a Kat cry ...

WIPO trade mark "neither necessary nor useful".  It is now ten days since the Kat alerted his friends at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to the scurrilous activities of an imitator which, it now seems, WIPO has known about for months (click here for the IPKat's most recent rant).  The Kat has now received this email from a respected professional colleague:

"...  Having seen the new WIPO logo I sent a letter to the Director General of WIPO in ... April 2010 advising them to register various marks including the new logo.

I received a letter in reply from WIPO dated ... May 2010. A relevant extract from the letter is (copy typed) as follows:

"In this respect, I would like to inform you that the name, abbreviation and emblem of WIPO in its present form as well as in all its previous forms are protected under Article 6ter of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. Consequently, separate trademark registrations for the signs in question appear to be neither necessary nor useful.""

It hardly seems worthy of mention that the WIPD's lookalike website is still up-and-running.

The Berlaymonster -- not very impressed with the Magenta Trade Mark litigation

Around the weblogs.  So far, the jiplp weblog poll to ascertain readers' opinions regarding the best way of abbreviating the name of the highest European Court (property called the "Court of Justice", this being a constituent part of the "Court of Justice of the European Union") has shown a marked preference for retention of "ECJ" as the short form.  There's still plenty of time for this to change, though, so you can cast your vote in that blog's side bar here. For those who prefer more intellectual content, a couple of jolly good Current Intelligence notes from JIPLP were added last week too: one on patent insufficiency from our own Matt Fisher, the other being an analysis of last year's hard-fought LEGO brick Community trade mark ruling from the ECJ, or is it the CFEU, by Jeremy Drew and Tamar Shafran. The Berlaymonster has something to say about trade marks in Europe too, in "Campest trademark battle ever reaches EU courts" which you can enjoy here - unless you work for Deutsche Telekom or TeliaSonera.  Want to give some sage advice to a copyright owner who has been ripped off in too small a manner as to make litigation worthwhile? Try the 1709 Blog here.


For those who enjoy reading research reports with "global" in their title, here's a treat.  The UK's Intellectual Property Office has has published a new report, commissioned by the late Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP) and executed by the IPKat's friend and former colleague Duncan Matthews: it's called "Patents in the Global Economy".  It's 33 pages long and you can read it here.

Full post as published by IPKat on January 17, 2011 (boomark / email).