Never Too Late: if you missed the IPKat last week

Asia Correspondent Tian Lu reported on an interesting copyright case in Japan, relating to artworks each comprising of a telephone booth being used as a goldfish tank.

The finely-tuned balance to be struck between novelty, insufficiency, and obviousness in deciding when to file a second-medical use patent application came under consideration of GuestKat Rose Hughes in relation to the Canadian Federal Court’s approach in the recent case of Teva v Pharmascience.

Kat friend Amala Umeike described a significant aspect of Nigeria’s Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2020 which allows trade mark owners to apply to prevent company promoters from registering their trade marks as company names.

How high is the bar for distinctiveness in EU trade mark applications? I reported on a recent decision of the EU’s General Court concerning Oatly’s word mark IT’S LIKE MILK BUT MADE FOR HUMANS, which confirmed a minimal distinctiveness requirement.

PermaKat Neil J. Wilkof discussed the future of the San Francisco Bay Area, considering whether it might have lost the sheen which allowed it to attract and retain the best innovative talent, especially in the tech sector.

In a guest post, Dr. Julia Hugendubel summarised the most recent developments in relation to the EU Commission’s proposed crypto-assets market Regulation, including the potential impact on IP applications. 

Never Too Late 300 [Week ending January 24]: Germany’s Federal Court of Justice gives weight to celebrity consent to media image use | Sony, Warner & Universal (mostly don’t) answer questions at the UK Music Streaming Inquiry | Nazi Aryanisation of intellectual property – and contemporary efforts to restore it | The inexorable rise of EPO oral proceedings by video conference | Book review: Copyright and Fundamental Rights in the Digital Age | Book review: Drafting Copyright Exceptions | Of novelty, inventiveness and sufficiency: how to write a good paper or thesis | [Event Report] IFIM Holiday Seminar – Tales of the New Doctors of Law | IFIM event: The Year of the COVID Vaccines | Upcoming ERA conferences and courses with special IPKat readers’ 25% discount

Never Too Late 299 [Week ending January 17]: Boards of Appeal are competent to overturn a finding of fact at first instance (T 1604/16) | General Court says that ‘ALMEA’ and ’MEA’ are confusingly similar | [Guest post] Unsung Florence Foster Jenkins screenwriter is entitled to joint authorship share | Royalty distribution in Nigeria: Must collective management organisations distribute royalties only to members whose works were used? | Print journalism under siege: podcasts to the rescue?

Photo by Ruca Souza from Pexels