Recently, the General Court in the HELL coffee case has confirmed that a descriptive foreign language term (German word HELL) can be granted protection under EU trade mark law (Hell Energy v. EUIPO, T-323/20).
When we talk about Trade Marks Trolls we don’t mean the ugly creature that might come to your mind. Instead, we speak about practices that constitute an abuse of trade mark law. So, how to defend yourself against such behaviour?
Although the delta variant is currently leading to a sharp increase in the number of positive Covid 19 tests, hospital admissions are fortunately still low. Let's hope it stays this way and that with the growing number of vaccinations we slowly move in the right direction with Covid 19 in Europe. If...
Can a single colour alone be a trademark? The question is neither new nor unexplored. However, old wine in a new bottle is presented by the General Court in its decision rejecting an attempt to register a shade of colour for inhalers for asthma and related pharmaceutical preparations, reinstating...
After the initial relief that followed upon reaching a Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom on Christmas Eve, we slowly see how this treaty is going to affect the tax domain. In this blog I will briefly focus on the area of fiscal state aid, i.e. the...
Using the trade mark of someone else to describe how your own products relate to the trademark products is allowed under certain circumstances. Recently, the law changed in this respect, leaving the application of some factors uncertain.
Schumacker is one of the most important cases in EU tax law. It opened the door to many more legal proceedings before the CJEU that tested the limits the Member States’ tax sovereignty against the force of EU law.
After an exhausting few months in the ‘COVID-19 era’—as we can call it now—after months of hard work and the stress of dealing with a pandemic, everybody is looking to take a break during the summer. But unlike in recent years when we could plan our summer vacation months in advance, this year it...
It feels sometimes as if the whole world of science is working exclusively on finding a cure for COVID-19. If you are looking at the search for an effective vaccine, it was recently published in The New York Times that more than 130 vaccine candidates are currently in the pipeline, which is still...
In the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across Europe are fortunately seeing a decrease in detected infections, hospital admissions and deaths. This is the effect of lockdown policies with different elements but with the common denominator of social distancing, travel restrictions...
