©-LAW

A Brompton Bicycle bike (top) and its alleged counterfeit (bottom) in the background national proceedings Since its seminal ruling  Infopaq  nearly 11 years ago  [Kat-celebration  here ] , the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been contributing fundamentally to both shaping and placing the building blocks of copyright protection in the EU.  Through a string of decisions (the most important being  Infopaq ,  BSA ,  FAPL ,  Painer ,  Football Dataco ,  SAS ,  Levola Hengelo , and  Cofemel ), the Court has answered the most basic and relevant question:  When does copyright protection arise? Today, the CJEU has issued  yet another ruling  contributing to this very debate. It did so in the context of a referral from Belgium -  Brompton Bicycle , C-833/18  - concerning copyright protection of functional shapes (in the background proceedings, it is the shape of Brompto...

A  mathematical discovery and a trade mark at once? A few days ago, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its  judgment  in the important  Gömböc  referral (C-237/19)  [see  here  for a discussion of the background] . The decision, which is analyzed in detail on The IPKat  here  and has been also discussed in the context of the  Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice ’s  first EU trade mark live webinar   [from 1:06:00; for the dates of the next webinars, see  here ] , is equally relevant to trade mark law (it was indeed a trade mark case concerning protection of 3D marks) and other IP rights (IPRs), including copyright. Assessment of functionality As far as trade marks are concerned, the most valuable aspect of the judgment is perhaps the one concerning how the assessment of ‘technical’ and ‘aesthetic functionality’ is to be conducted under what is currently Article 7...