Tuesday tiddlywinks

Meeting of minds, or meeting of minders? The European Patent Office's Board 28 meets tomorrow.  The IPKat suspects that, after it has done so, we may be hearing about the consequences -- but this is a matter which he leaves to Merpel, whose post on Board 28 last week has already been much read and commented-upon.

Grrr ...

Bull baits bulldog.  Red Bull GmbH v OHIM, Case T-78/13, is one of those decisions that is too small to give a whole blogpost to, but too interesting to ignore completely. So what happened? Setting aside the decision of the Second Board of Appeal, the General Court last Thursday upheld Red Bull's challenge to Sun Mark's application to register the word BULLDOG as a Community trade mark for various drinks. Red Bull relied on its own earlier international and Austrian registrations of the word mark BULL and RED BULL, registered for identical goods, but it was basically the BULL registrations that won the day. Said the General Court, on account of the extra letters DOG in BULLDOG, the two marks had only average visual and phonetic similarity -- and most non-English speakers would not normally be familiar with the word "bull" (which was pronounced differently in most European languages) and, among those unfamiliar with the word "bull", there was obviously no conceptual similarity. However, for English-speaking drinkers, there was in England a certain but not very well-known association between bulls and bulldogs in that bulldogs had originally been bred to participate in bull-baiting. Overall, the marks were similar. This being so, and given that it seemed to have slipped the attention of the  Board of Appeal that the two marks were for identical goods, there was a likelihood of confusion.

Around the weblogs. Ben Challis's latest CopyKat column on the 1709 Blog is a Grammy special. The MARQUES Class 99 weblog announces that the UK Intellectual Property Office is tendering for research on the infringement of registered and unregistered design rights, while that organisation's Class 46 weblog proclaims the launch of a members' survey on how they are getting on with the latest version of the European Union's Customs Regulation. Art & artifice's Rosie Burbidge pertinently asks "Is copyright in a 1980s Michael Jordan photo infringed by the Jumpman logo?"  Finally, the jiplp weblog publishes its February contents and Katfriend Paul Joseph's guest editorial on "Copyright Reform: End of a Dream?"


Nordic e-book. After this Kat posted this piece on next month's forthcoming Nordic IPR Forum, which is offering all readers of this weblog a 10% reduction on its its registration fees, the organisers sent him a link to a short (15 page) e-book,"The Next Chapter of Nordic IPR", the theme of which runs thus:

"The Nordic countries have a strong history in research and innovation in the IP sphere, this alongside well-developed traditional and digital infrastructure, places the region at the forefront of the industry. This eBook will focus on the most important strategic challenges facing IP owners and innovators, as well as those who advise them in 2015. Primarily, such challenges mentioned will address the best methods to achieve monetisation, how to move to mobile IP, the impact of US litigation on the Nordic region, the challenges of attorney-client privilege and other forms of IP value creation".

You can access this little book, which contains the findings of a Nordic IPR survey taken last year, here.

Oxford University Press is having a Winter Sale.  You can access the full list of books on offer here.  There are several IP classics on the list, ranging from a wonderful piece of scholarship that is Colonial Copyright Intellectual Property in Mandate Palestine by Michael D. Birnhack to works aimed at the practitioner such as Indian Patent Law and Practice by K.C. Kankanala and A.K. Narasani.  Do check the list out: you may find some treasures there that will provide pleasure, recreation, information and security ...