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Did you think that the Rubik's Cube EU trade mark saga was over? Of course not.  Further to the 2016 judgment ( C-30/15 P ) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)  [Katpost  here ]  and the return of the case to the EUIPO, yesterday the General Court (GC) issued yet another ruling ( T-601/17 ). The GC confirmed that the trade mark registration should be cancelled on consideration that it falls within the scope of application of the absolute ground in what is currently Article 7(1)(e)(ii)  EUTMR   (the case was decided under the 1994 Regulation). This provision prevents registration of " signs which consist exclusively of  the shape, or another characteristic, of goods which is necessary to obtain a technical result" (the addition of "or another characteristic" occurred in the context of the 2015 reform). Background   In 1996, Seven Toys filed an application to register the 3-D sign above as an EUTM f...

Over the past few months several media outlets have been reporting on a series of copyright lawsuits filed in the US against celebrities over their social media (in particular: Instagram) feeds  [Katposts by Hayleigh  here ,  here , and  here ] .  Whilst some of these lawsuits concerned fairly straightforward issues, that is the publication of third-party photographs portraying third parties  [eg, Versace publishing a photograph of Jennifer Lopez wearing Versace:  here ; or super-model Gigi Hadid posting a picture of her boyfriend  Zayn Malik :  here ] , others are potentially more intriguing in that they relate to the publication by celebrities of photographs of themselves.  The first of this series of recent lawsuits is the one concerning the publication, by Gigi Hadid on her Instagram account, of this photograph of herself taken by a paparazzo:  The complaint was eventually  dismissed  becaus...

A different type of 'seeding' ... The IPKat has just learned that a new referral on,  inter alia , the interpretation of Article 3(1) of the  InfoSoc Directive  has just been made to the Court of Justice of the European Union in relation to 'seeding'.  First of all: what is 'seeding'?  As explained by the relevant  Wikipedia entry , In computing and specifically peer-to-peer file sharing, seeding is the uploading of already downloaded content for others to download from. A peer, a computer that is connected to the network, becomes a seed when having acquired the entire set of data it tries to download. This data consists of small parts so that seeds can effectively share their content with other peers, handing out the missing pieces. A peer deliberately chooses to become a seed by leaving the upload task active when content is downloaded. This means that there should be motivation to seed. The opposite of a seed is a leech, a peer that do...