Waterfront partner, Matthew Harris, acting as advocate has secured a win in a contested hearing before the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office in a recent trade mark invalidity case. US company Andover Healthcare Inc had sought to invalidate the KO-FLEX trade mark of Urgo Limited for bandages by claiming prior rights in the term COFLEX under the law of passing off. The case was unusual in that the hearing officer had to consider the scope of Andover’s rights in the late 1990s and this required a consideration of the impact of the Medical Devices Regulations 1994 on market practice.
The decision was issued on 4 February 2015, but only now become publically available on the UK IPO website
One of the hottest trade mark issues around at the moment is the question of how effectively can trade mark rights protect brand owners’ interests in non-fungible tokens (otherwise known as “NFTs”). Given the relatively nascent technology of NFTs, there have been few trade mark cases in Europe…
In the recently published post Waterfront Law – The IPEC Guide, we highlighted the “costs cap” as a feature of IPEC that is of real benefit to litigants. This is because a party can be confident that, should it lose in IPEC on liability (i.e. usually the decision…