Case law

On 25 January 2024 the CJEU issued the long-awaited judgement in the already famous AUDI case (C-334/22). This judgment confirms the possibility of Audi trade mark infringement in terms of the legal…

  Part 1 of this year’s retrospective provided a general overview over the GC case law from 2023 with numbers and a special focus on genuine use cases. Part 2 now focuses on weak marks. The reader is…

  The year is ending and so it is time, once again, to look at what has been coming out of the General Court (GC) over the past 12 months. While the numbers here are only approximate, resulting from…

In October 2023, the Danish Supreme Court ruled in a trademark case concerning the trademark “TREK”.  In recent years the Danish Supreme Court has rarely dealt with trademark disputes (due to the…

The parodist could not rely on First Amendment protection because it used the famous sneakers as a source identifier. The maker of a sneaker that parodied a famous brand of skateboard-friendly kicks…

The marks are generic both as to “Carnival” and the geographic locations “St Thomas” and “Virgin Islands.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a lower court decision denying the…

The murals were merely hidden from public view, not modified or destroyed. A law school that covered up two controversial murals with acoustic panels in order to hide them from public view did not…

If the third-party marks and opposer’s marks are identical, the opposer’s marks and the applicant’s marks are compared to see if they are identical or non-identical for identical goods or services…

The trade dress of a wedge-shaped candy, colored to resemble a slice of watermelon, was determined to be functional and not eligible for protection under federal trademark law. The U.S. Court of…