Trade Marks
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| This can’t be comfortable |
Solo IPinvites its readers to provide feedback regarding Amazon’s new Brand Registry for its sellers. Several questions have been raised: Are graphical marks eligible for registration? What entitlements will the Registry confer on the registered sellers? What about fair use of the trade mark? These questions are quite open, because only Amazon seems to know the answers…
Patents
Patentlyohas more on procedural patent law issues. It offers a counter to Professor Saurabh Vishnubhakat’s recent opinionabout the scope and application of the right of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to intervene in an appeal before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 143. The authors argue that the precedent strongly supports the USPTO’s ability to intervene in most, if not all, appeals from the PTAB.
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| This Kat had enough of Alice in Wonderland |
IP Finance reports on a couple of interesting software-related cases, Berkheimer v. HP, and Aatrix Software v. Green Shades Software, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit appears to depart from the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank International decision, which made subject matter eligibility a primary inquiry with respect to patentability. The upshot of these two decisions is that an alleged infringer will likely have a more difficult time in seeking to dismiss an action at an early stage on the ground that there is no eligible subject matter, potentially giving the patentee greater leverage over the opposing party.
Kluwer Patent Blog reports that the final piece of legislation in the process of ratification of the UPCA in the UK (i.e. The Unified Patent Court (Immunities and Privileges) Order) by the Privy Council) has been formally passed, and it is available here. As a next step, the UK Intellectual Property Office will need to collect together the relevant evidence that all legislative steps have been taken to enable ratification, and provide this to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which will then check the evidence, prepare the formal instrument, have it signed by the Minister (Boris Johnson MP) and finally lodge it in Brussels. If given priority, this process would normally take a few weeks.
Copyright
Kluwer Copyright Blog reflects on the CJEU referral in a dispute between German online internet news portal “Spiegel Online” and Volker Beck, a member of the German Bundestag on behalf of the Green Party. The Bundesgerichtshof has asked the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on the balance between copyright exceptions and the fundamental freedoms of information and the media, as well as the exceptions for quotation and reporting of current events in the light of Article 5(3)(d) of the InfoSoc Directive.
Trade Secrets
Trust in IP continues its review (earlier post may be found here) of the rules on trade secrets, software and reverse engineering in light of the Trade Secrets Directive as well as the Software Directive. The focus of the present piece is on the implementation of the provision on reverse engineering in Finnish legislation and describes an interesting relationship between trade secrets and copyright.
Image credits: Jackie and Ekaterina Smyshnova