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13 Mar 2024
M&S success in the gin-famous case against Aldi

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.

08 Mar 2024
Preliminary Injunctions at the UPC – What have we learnt from the first decision of the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court?

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.

07 Mar 2024
A hardening of the boundaries of UPC public access applications

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.

05 Jan 2024
Lights out for Lewis Hamilton in dispute with Swiss watchmaker

“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.

19 Dec 2023
Generative AI – Will large language models (LLMs) eat themselves?

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.

08 Dec 2023
Will a stay of UPC revocation proceedings be granted in view of a parallel opposition at the EPO?

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.

05 Dec 2023
Is that a computer program? AI’m not so sure

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.

 

14 Nov 2023
Battle of the X’s: X Social Media v X Corp.

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.

31 Oct 2023
Protecting your Brand in a Global Market

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.

24 Oct 2023
Brand Protection in a Global Market

A good brand name immediately distinguishes a business from its competitors and, over time, can become an extremely valuable asset in its own right. It is vital that businesses protect their brands and this is primarily done by means of trade mark registration.

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