Case law

A news publication could not rely on First Amendment protection for its use of a mark even though it made no attempt to parody the original. A news publication named with a common English language…

  Will the CJEU take a deep dive into the right of possession? The European Court of Justice will have to deal with this question following a reference from the German Federal Supreme Court (Decision…

The Fifth Circuit also added non-genuine bezels to the district court’s injunction to make it consistent with the district court’s other findings. In a trademark infringement case involving…

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…