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Earlier today, the General Court (GC) issued a  keenly-awaited ruling  (T‑307/17), in which it upheld the earlier decision of the EUIPO Second Board of Appeal (R 1515/2016-2), and found this three-stripe EU trade mark (EUTM) owned by adidas: invalid. In a nutshell, the GC found that: The trade mark at issue would not be a pattern mark, but an ordinary figurative mark;  The forms of use, eg colour scheme, of said trade mark should not to be taken into account; and  adidas failed to prove acquired distinctiveness throughout the EU. Let's see more in detail how the court reasoned. Background In 2014. adidas obtained an EUTM for the sign represented above, described as consisting of "three parallel equidistant stripes of identical width, applied on the product in any direction" for goods in Class 25 of the Nice Agreement. Also that year, Shoe Branding Europe filed an application for a declaration of invalidity of the EUTM pursu...

The IPKat's favourite type of link The IPKat is back with the 6th instalment of the DSM Directive ( Directive 2019/790 ) series  [previous episodes  here ,  here ,  here ,  here , and  here ] . Today's topic is once again Article 15 and the new press publishers' right.  Among other things, the protection granted under Article 15(1), that is the right of EU-based press publishers to control the reproduction and making available for online use of their press publications by information society service provider s, " shall not apply to acts of hyperlinking " (Article 15(1), subparagraph 3). Recital 57 substantially states the same thing, by providing that " [t]he rights granted to publishers of press publications should not extend to acts of hyperlinking ." Hyperlinks and the press publishers' right: from the original proposal to the final version The final version of the directive is not dissimilar from  the o...

One of the T-shirts produced by the defendant Italian image rights protection is notoriously quite strong and is also available post mortem. In the latter case, consent to the use of one's own likeness must be obtained, in the first place, from the person's spouse and children. An estate that has been quite keen on enforcing post mortem image rights is that of actress  Audrey Hepburn . Not all readers might be aware of the fact that the late icon had a close connection with Italy: in fact,  her second husband  was Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. They had a soon together, Luca Andrea, who was born in 1970. The IPKat has already  reported  on a  case  brought jointly by Luca Andrea Dotti and Audrey Hepburn's other son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, and decided by the Court of First Instance of Milan in 2015 concerning unauthorized evocation (not even direct use) of the likeness of Audrey Hepburn in an advertisement.  Th...

Also The IPKat has a  Facebook page (not used for libellous and defamatory comments  alas  though)  When it comes to content removal in the context of an injunction, how is this to be done in order to comply with the prohibition of a general monitoring obligation, as per Article 15 of the  E-commerce Directive ?  This, in a nutshell, is the issue at stake in  Facebook , C-18/18 , a referral for a preliminary ruling from the Austrian Supreme Court made in the context of national proceedings concerning defamatory comments published on Facebook.  Yesterday, Advocate General (AG) Szpunar delivered his  Opinion , which opens with a quote from  The Social Network  (the film about the beginning of Facebook): “The internet’s not written in pencil, it’s written in ink”. Indeed, as the AG effectively summed up, this case concerns:  whether a host which operates an online social network platform may be required ...