Armenia and the design treaties; Latest IP&T

The IPKat has spotted some good news from Armenia. WIPO has announced that, on 13 April 2007, the Republic of Armenia deposited an instrument of accession to the Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs. The Geneva Act will enter into force in respect of the Republic of Armenia, on 13 July 2007. As if that wasn't exciting enough, by a curious coincidence the Republic of Armenia has done the very same thing regarding the Locarno Agreement Establishing an International Classification for Industrial Designs. So if you're in Armenia on 13 July and you are committed to international design registration, don't forget to party!

More on Armenian design here and here


Quietly awaiting IPKat bloggie Jeremy on his return from the INTA Meeting in Chicago was his copy of LexisNexis Butterworths' Intellectual Property and Technology Cases for April 2007. Four major European Court of Justice trade mark rulings are reported in this issue: those in Adam Opel v Autec, Montex v Diesel, Anheuser-Busch v Budejovicky Budvar (an oldie from November 2004) and KWS Saat v OHIM (an even bigger oldie, that one, from October 2004, but a good read on whether stricter criteria were employed for determining distinctiveness of colour marks than for other types of potentially registrable subject-matter).

The IPKat can't help wondering whether there's much mileage in reporting cases that are two and a half years old for the sake of completeness: any subscriber to the IP&T who wanted one or other of those old cases would have had no problem doing so long before now, whether by accessing a headnoted report from one of the other commercial law reports or by simply downloading the raw ruling from the Curia website and taking the trouble to read it for himself.