Recent periodicals

The December 2007 issue of Sweet & Maxwell's monthly European Trade Mark Reports is now out. It's pretty fat, but much of the weight can be put down to the annual index. Cases covered in this issue include

* Antartica Slr v OHIM, the Court of First Instance's ruling that Antartica had no right to register the word and figurative mark NASDAQ in the face of the very well-known NASDAQ stock exchange price quotation service;

* Game Group plc v First Internet Technology Ltd, a .eu domain name dispute in which an adverse registrant of the game.eu url nearly, oh so nearly, got away with it;
* the ruling in European Court of Justice Case C‑17/06, Céline SARL v Céline SA (see IPKat comments here), that the same principles that govern other forms of trade mark infringement apply equally to alleged infringements through the use of a business name.

As usual, if you know of any interesting European trade mark case that should be reported in full in the ETMR, just email the IPKat here and let him know.


The November issue of the ETMR's little sister the European Copyright and Designs Reports is also available. This issue of the six-times-a-year title contains reports on five cases, including

* ADAGP v Editions Fernand Hazan, a French Cour de Cassation ruling on whether the paintings of the famous impressionist were part of the public domain or if any further copyright could be squeezed out of them;

Right: Monet -- a great painter, but doesn't his garden look a little untidy?

* SCRL Soc. Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs v SA Scarlet - a Belgian dispute as to whether an internet service provider was liable for an act of copyright infringement following peer-to-peer use.