It is generally not possible to get exclusive rights to a descriptive name. If the trademark is descriptive, it is not distinctive and cannot be registered (unless it has acquired distinctiveness through use). What are descriptive names? Descriptive names are names...
The conventional wisdom holds that differentiation is an essential part of marketing and product creation strategy. Differentiate or die. Being different means essentially that your brand is perceived to be meaningfully different from its competitors and is bought...
Messi turns EU's top judges into giggling fanboys Lionel Messi has just won an important case in the Court of Justice of the European Union. By accepting Messi’s appeal, the judges ignored well established legal principles, rolled out a red carpet and confirmed that...
Trademarks and patents are both intellectual property assets, but they protect very different things. Patents protect technological inventions - for example, how a product or its feature works, whereas trademarks protect brands, such as product names and logos. They...
The list of goods and services you submit in your trademark application defines the extent of your rights. We get a large number of clients that have done a national trademark application themselves but want help in protecting their trademark in the EU. Almost without...
While the coronavirus crisis has devastated economies around the world and led to a decline in overall economic activity, it has spurred a large number of trademark applications starting with the word “Covid”. According to data from the EU trademark office’s “TmView”...
Ferrari 250 GTO, produced between 1962 and 1964, is an iconic car. Only 36 cars were ever produced. They are also the most valuable collector cars in the world with a record-breaking sale price of 70 million USD in 2018. The car has enormous value and goodwill for...
The recent decision of the US Supreme Court highlights the challenges of having a brand consisting of a generic name combined with a generic top-level domain. Generic names do not become distinctive trademarks merely by adding a top-level domain name such as .com to...
Slogans can be protected as trademarks. However, in practice it is often the case that a slogan does not meet the requirements for registrability. So what is a good and protectable slogan? Slogans can be extremely powerful communication tools. A good slogan is easy to...