B9 11899. "There is so much talk these days of modernising our system of IP protection and enforcement that we occasionally fail to appreciate the utility of what we already have -- if we only stop to think what we can do with it. A perfect illustration of this comes from the IPKat's friend Joris van Manen (Hoyng Monegier, Amsterdam), who seems to have found an example to emphasise this point in a little gem of Dutch litigation, Screentime and Five Divas v SBS, an interim injunction decision of the District Court, The Hague, on 5 November.
(…) But all was not lost! Screentime had established a sufficiently plausible case that it has used the sign POPSTARS so intensively in The Netherlands that the sign, notwithstanding its descriptive nature, was a well-known trade mark for the production and transmission of a song contest programme under Article 6bis of Paris Convention and Article 16(2) TRIPs: it was entitled to protection against use of the words "The Next Popstar" since that word was visually, aurally and conceptually similar to the defendants' choice of programme name that use of the latter could confuse the relevant public. After all, it was to be used for the very service for which the earlier mark had acquired a reputation.
(…) the Paris Convention is of 1883 vintage and thus positively antediluvian in intellectual property terms -- but it's great to see how nifty it can be in plugging temporary gaps in a company's trade mark portfolio. Merpel's just fascinated at the thought of a judge on an interim injunction application taking a provisional view of the validity of the claimant's trade mark. (...) Validity is far too complex a matter to be raised in interim relief proceedings, she feels.
You can read the decision in full, in English, here, thanks to Joris." (oorspronkelijk vonnis hier: B9 11845). Lees het voleldige bericht hier.
