A trade mark event coming to Holborn Bars

The IPKat's old friend Tibor Gold MBE will be in action at Holborn Bars (right), in London's historical intellectual property heartland, on Tuesday 4 June, when he chairs a timely one-day conference programme that will appeal to anyone whose concern extends to the currently unsettled state of trade mark law and practice in the United Kingdom and, not far beyond it, in the territory of the European Economic Area.  This programme is timely because Europe stands at the crossroads of major trade mark reform, with the European Commission contemplating the first fully-fledged overhaul of the continent's current Community and national trade mark systems since they came into operation in April 1996 [if you're interested -- and you should be -- you can find a user-friendly note on the EU Commission Proposals for Amendments to the EU Trade Mark System, plus MARQUES' comments on them, here].

While there's a great deal of Brussels-gazing going on at the moment, it can be helpful to appreciate the standpoint from which you are doing that gazing -- and this programme is unashamedly rooted in what is actually happening in the UK today: the relevance and admissibility of survey evidence, for example, has been more fiercely contested more in the past year, following Mr Justice Arnold's Interflora ruling, than in the past two decades. It will be good to know what Bird & Bird's Peter Brownlow and Three New Square's Denise McFarland have to say on this topic -- and on expert evidence too.


Another topic that demands our better appreciation is that of using other businesses' brands and trade marks in comparative and referential advertising. This issue seemed so straightforward till the Court of Justice of the European Union got its hands on it and now, following its ruling on smell-alike scent marks in Case C-487/07 L'Oréal v Bellure [on which see Katpost here], while we know what we can't do, we're not so sure of what we can do. Life after L'Oréal is a topic that both Pail Jordan (Bristows) and Nicholas Saunders (Brick Court) will have a chance to reflect on.

These and other topics will be on the menu for what promises to be tasty fare for the trade mark practitioner -- and if all else fails there's always the networking (this Kat recalls that previous IP events at Holborn Bars have usually provided Walker's biscuits with the tea and coffee, a source of much pleasure even though there is the correlative inconvenience of shaking the crumbs out of his keyboard at the end of the day ...).

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You can check this programme out for yourself here.

This Sweet & Maxwell Professional Development event (being under the aegis of Thomson Reuters, who coincidentally publish the European Trade Mark Reports (ETMR) which this Kat is paid privileged to edit), offers an early bird registration discount of £320 + VAT if you sign up by 3 May, and both early and late birds can register for £295 + VAT if they are members of sponsoring organisations the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) or the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA). 6 CPD points are up for grabs ...