NIPC Law

This was Mr Justice Henderson's judgment in the trial of an action between two Gibraltar based online gambling concerns. The claimant in 32Red Plc v WHG (International) Ltd and others [2011] EWHC 62 (Ch) (21 Jan 2011) had sued for infringement of Community trade mark 2814424 and British trade mark 2509861 . The defendants had counterclaimed for invalidation of those registrations. The signs to which the claimants objected were the words "32vegas.com", "32vegas" and "32v" and three devices incorporating the numeral 32. In a rather long judgment, His Lordship identified the following issues and considered them in the following order: whether the CTM been infringed under art 9 (1) (b) of the CTM regulation? whether it had been infringed under art 9 (1) (c); whether the CTM registration was invalid; whether the British trade mark registration was invalid; and whether the British mark had been infringed. Mr. Justice Henderson found that the

This was an appeal against the following judgments of Mr Justice Floyd: Nokia GmbH v Ipcom GmbH & Co KG [2009] EWHC 3482 (Pat) (18 Jan 2010) ("the main judgment"); [2009] EWHC 3034 (Pat) (20 Nov 2009) ("the first amendment judgment"); and [2010] EWHC 789 (Pat) (31 March 2009) ("the second amendment judgment"). The litigation concerned two patents which the trial judge described as follows: "The two patents relate to cellular mobile phone technology. Broadly speaking, the first of the patents, European Patent (UK) No. 540 808 ("808"), is concerned with the way in which the mobile phone synchronises itself with the transmissions it receives from the base station. The second of the patents, European Patent (UK) No. 1 186 189 ("189"), is concerned with management of the right of the mobile phone to connect to the network." In the appeal, Lord Justice Jacob referred to 808 as the "synch patent" and 189 as the "

I should first like to wish my readers a happy New Year. Good riddance to the old one which was awful. After the emergency budget in June virtually every SME in England seemed to go to earth. The explanation is not hard to fathom. Litigation is funded largely on tick. So, too, is new product design and development. With the banks rebuilding their balance sheets and making only the payments that they really have to make, such as bonuses to their executives and traders, frivolous matters such as branding and innovation just have to wait. A sign of the times is that Judge Birss's spanking new intellectual property court is posting reports of decisions on paper like the Media CAT cases or case management conferences such as Westwood v Knight. The first case of 2011 is much more exciting. A summary judgment application would you believe. In Fitco Inc. v Haugh [2011] EWPCC 1 (6 Jan 2011) a former director of a company that had made its peace with the claimants, was sued for join