Insights

The Court of Appeal recently issued its judgment in the latest episode of the colourful legal saga between Lidl and Tesco, upholding the High Court’s decision that Tesco’s use of its ‘Clubcard Prices’ sign amounted to trade mark infringement and passing off.  Trade Mark Assistant, Daniel Wheatley, provides insight on the recent judgement.

In a recent decision, the Court of Appeal has upheld the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court’s (“IPEC”) earlier decision that Aldi infringed registered designs owned by M&S, dismissing Aldi’s appeal in its entirety.

The Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued its first substantive decision on 26 February 2024.  The Appeal concerned a preliminary injunction granted by the UPC Local Division in Munich to 10X Genomics against NanoString Technologies.

A new order has been issued by the UPC regarding Rule 262.1(b) RoP applications in Bitzer v Carrier (UPC_CFI_ 263/2023), in which Dehns is acting on behalf of the defendant, Carrier Corporation.

This is the latest in a series of orders in this area, which further hardens the boundaries of such applications by extending the list of documents that the Court will not provide public access to, further limiting the transparency of the Court.

“In this line of work, it’s vital that we do not conflate our personal perception with that of the ‘average consumer’ — a legal concept that serves as a reference point for assessing trademark disputes”. Dehns UK Chartered Trade Mark Attorney, Alexandra Nott, discusses the recent EUIPO Board of Appeal decision which held that Lewis Hamilton is not a well-known sports personality in the EU.

Many large language models have been trained using freely available web content, whether that be from crawling the internet, or using more specialised sources of content such as databases of patents or scientific articles.  Until recently it has been relatively ensured that most of this content is essentially human-generated.  Such content has therefore served as a useful source of training data for generative AI models, with models such as ChatGPT capable of generating text that may not be immediately and easily distinguished from human-generated content.  Similar generative AI models are increasingly used for producing image and audio content.  Newer models may therefore start being trained on content that potentially includes a significant, and increasing, proportion of content that has been generated by another model.

At Dehns, we have been eagerly awaiting the outcome of the application for a stay of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) revocation proceedings between Astellas and Healios.  The Court may stay proceedings pursuant to Article 33(10) UCPA and Rule 295(a) RoP in the case that there are opposition proceedings before the EPO where “a decision in such proceedings may be expected to be given rapidly”.  Which rapidly led to the question: just what is meant by “rapidly”?  Well, we now have one answer to this question.

Dehns Engineering Associate, John Somerton, discusses the recent High Court ruling, which finds that the training and use of an artificial neural network to suggest related media files to a user (e.g. to recommend songs) is a potentially patentable invention. The ruling has lead to the UKIPO abruptly suspending its guidelines on patenting AI inventions.

The news that X Corp. (formerly Twitter) is being sued over its use of “X” will be unsurprising to many. Indeed, such a possibility was predicted by numerous IP experts and media outlets.  My previous article (linked at the end of this article [1]) discussed Twitter’s change to X, as well as some earlier rights that could be potential conflicts for X Corp.  Whilst some of those earlier rights may still be a problem for X Corp., there is one company in particular that holds a trade mark including the letter X, which will certainly have the attention of X Corp.’s legal team.

In this webinar, Clare Mann takes listeners on a whistle-stop tour of the world of trade marks. In the first half, Clare covers the fundamentals of what a trade mark is and why they are important, and in the second half she looks at the steps that should be considered when a business is looking to expand its trade mark protection to other countries.