EU

Registering your chosen name as a trademark helps safeguard that brand value by providing a mechanism to act against third parties seeking to profit from your name and hard work. But, choosing and protecting a 'strong' brand name isn't always as easy as it may appear! In our latest factsheet, we share seven key steps to success.

When businesses merge with or acquire other businesses, the challenge for IP professionals doesn’t stop once the deal is complete. For IP rights to be properly updated and maintained, the question of how to brand and structure the newly merged business first needs to be addressed.

Have you ever thought about using a well-known painting or work of art as a trademark? It is a strategy that has proved successful in the past, as illustrated by Nestlé’s adoption of the Johannes Vermeer painting Milkmaid. However, there are a number of pitfalls that must first be identified and overcome, as Volha Parfenchyk explains.

On 1 June 2022, Novagraaf's Luke Portnow and Thomsen Trampedach's Markus Rouvinen provided useful take-home points and experiences on implementing smart solutions to current IP challenges in private practice and in-house.

The joint study released in March also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing problems by opening new opportunities for illicit trade.

If you registered your brand name as a trademark, you can oppose the (more recent) use of a similar name for similar products and/or services if that use could cause confusion among the relevant public. To exercise your trademark rights, you must first monitor and identify for conflicting use. 

Establishing valid priority claims can be challenging for co-applicants in Europe, as Stéphanie Landais-Patarin explains.

If you receive an invoice or special offer from a company you do not know, there is a risk it could be a scam. A growing number of dishonest companies are sending out fake invoices and misleading offers hoping to catch patent and trademark owners unaware. 

Oppositions to EU trademark applications that included the word ‘Rocky’ have been rejected on the grounds that any likelihood of confusion with the titular film character has been neutralised by the obvious conceptual differences.

PPH programmes can help patent applicants to accelerate the grant of a patent application in a second patent office. We set out the opportunities and benefits of the system.

EU General Court decision of 1 December 2021 reaffirms that neither market preferences nor commercial or aesthetic considerations are considered limits to design freedom, as Julia Schefman explains.

Latest development at the EPO is a further example of the challenges that applicants, particularly from the US, face when ensuring valid priority claims for European Patent (EP) applications, as Dr Oliver Harris explains.