Trademarks & Domain Names

Rebekah Vardy has successfully registered WAGATHA CHRISTIE as a UK trademark after a recent libel case hit the tabloids, but is it vulnerable to bad faith?

In disputes over pharmaceutical trademarks, the courts take a precautionary approach to exclude any risk of confusion between two medicines marketed under similar brand names. However, this restrictive approach has been qualified by EU case law, as Florence Chapin explains.

Parallel imports, also known as ‘exhaustion of trademark rights’ or the ‘first sale doctrine’, is a well-known limitation to the rights of trademark owners. Volha Parfenchyk discusses the practice in the context of two recent EU rulings on the branding of generic medicinal products.

Changes to trademark registration requirements promised to herald a new era for non-traditional trademarks, such as shape marks, in the EU. But, has anything really changed for trademark owners, asks Megan Creemers.

The sessions scheduled at INTA's 2023 Annual Meeting remind us that trademarks are not the only rights to consider when looking at brand protection.

Artist Mason Rothschild has been ordered to pay Maison Hermès International US$133,000, after a New York jury rejected his defence of freedom of expression to find instead that his ‘MetaBirkin’ NFT infringed the fashion house’s trademark rights.

Air France KLM has successfully brought EU trademark opposition proceedings on the grounds of likelihood of confusion for the trademark ‘Flying Blue’ and the domain name flyingblue.com, as used for the airline's frequent flyer programme. Frouke Hekker outlines the EUIPO ruling and explains how likelihood of confusion is assessed.

Non-traditional trademarks, such as those protecting shapes, smells and sounds, are becoming an increasingly popular way for companies to distinguish their products and services. Savvy Kaushal explains how to register a sound mark in the EU.

A single letter can be registered as a trademark, provided that it is distinctive in relation to the goods and services to which it applies. But enforcing short signs, such as single letter trademarks, is another challenge.

The 2022 Review of Notorious Counterfeiting and Piracy Markets by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) has assessed the volume of online marketplace counterfeiting and ranked sites by worst offender.

You may already have started to consider how best to protect your IP rights in new digital worlds and on blockchain technologies. But did you know that the emergence of NFTs, the blockchain, metaverses and Web 3.0 also has implications for your domain name strategy? In our latest factsheet, we discuss NFT domains and offer strategies for success.

The international systems for trademark and design protection continue to expand with Brazil the latest country to file an instrument of accession to the design protection system and Mauritius acceding the trademark system. The more countries that join the systems the better for companies that operate internationally.