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Sebago puts pressure back on politicians

Article 6 of Law 255/1998 for Protecting New Varieties of Plants stipulates the conditions the variety must meet in order to be considered novel. These conditions are fully harmonized with the corresponding provisions of UPOV (the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants), Article 6 (1) (b).

Under Australian law "a complete specification must describe the invention fully, including the best method known to the applicant of performing the invention" . Case law states that "....the objection of insufficiency is concerned only with enabling addressees amongst the public, on the expiration of the patentee´ s monopoly, to successfully use the specification for their own purposes.

The German Federal Supreme Court recently issued a decision on colour marks (Farbmarke gelb/schwarz, December 10 1998), which has ended a controversy in Germany. According to this decision, non-contoured definite colours or compositions of colours are registrable as trade marks.

The Japan Supreme Court handed down the first decision concerning standards to be used in recognizing the gist of a claimed invention in the landmark March 1991 case involving the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the German company Boehringer-Mannheim.

Moves, Deals, Developments

United States district courts have reached different conclusions as to the effect of foreign patent proceedings on US patent litigation.

In January this year Estonia adopted several amendments to the laws regulating the protection of intellectual property and in particular the sanctions for the infringement of intellectual property rights. The amendments had been due to the need both to solve the problems arising during the implementation of these laws thus far and harmonizing the laws with EC Directives in this field. All the amendments are designed to make the fight against pirated and counterfeit goods more effective and in this way to prevent any further distribution of counterfeit goods in Estonia.

In the April 1998 issue of MIP we presented comments about the development of IP rights for the first five years of the existence of the Czech Industrial Property Office. 1998 figures show a continuity in all fields of IP rights. The number of new patent applications is still increasing, utility models and designs are more or less steady and trade mark applications are slowly decreasing. What is quite important from the internal point of view is the fact that for the first time not only since 1993, but since 1990, the number of domestic applicants went up slightly. Figures showing the number of trade mark registrations prove that the backlog from previous years has already been overcome. When comparing the number of filings with the number of registrations, it can be clearly seen that registrations more or less correspond to filings as we must bear in mind that some applications do not mature into registrations due to objections both from the part of the Office and from third parties.

Why is it that so many Community Trade Mark applications are being filed in the Dutch language? Are Dutch enterprises more aware of the need for trade mark protection than companies in other countries? A closer look to the nationality of the applicants of those Dutch trade marks, however, reveals that many of them have no connection whatsoever with the Netherlands. Why then is the Dutch language so popular as a filing language?