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Sign up now for Hague Agreement seminar in London
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The next MARQUES/WIPO seminar on Mastering The Hague Agreement will take place in London on Monday 18 June. That is just five days after the Hague Agreement comes into effect for the UK so it will be a very timely event for design law practitioners!
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New: Expert talk with Serbian trade mark judges
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The first MARQUES Judges Meeting in Serbia will take place on 31 May 2018. It will be held at the Intellectual Property Office in Belgrade, starting at 09.15
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Webinar on social media and marketplaces
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Did you miss “Social Media and Marketplaces back to basics: ...'Food' for thoughts” on 29 March? Don’t worry: you can now watch the webinar, and download the presentations
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MARQUES attends Anti-Scam Network meeting in Alicante
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The 3rd Anti-Scam Network meeting was held at EUIPO in Alicante on 19 April. It was attended by representatives of EUIPO, EPO and WIPO, most IP offices in Europe and user associations. MARQUES was represented by Willem Leppink, Chair of the Anti-Fraud Task Force
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The Network discusses how to deal with fraudulent and misleading invoices as well as other attempts to scam IP rights owners. There was a lot of interest in the recent decision by the Court of Appeal in Uppsala, Sweden, in which MARQUES was a party, and Willem presented some information on this. EUIPO thanked MARQUES for its work. To find out more about this case, see the blog post “Scammers jailed over misleading invoices”. EUIPO’s team provided information on their latest activities in this area, including IT measures, interaction with users and cooperation. EUIPO is publicising the issue via the press and social media. EUIPO has also put in place tools such as web application firewalls to avoid webscraping, whilst ensuring that law firms that use a lot of data are not being wrongly blocked. The Office is now publishing examples of misleading invoices on its website. It has about 1,000 customer interactions each year regarding this issue. Those concerned about misleading invoices can contact EUIPO by email: information@euipo.europa.eu Beyond EUIPO, the TM5 network is also looking at this issue, and a rise in fraudulent invoices has been seen in the US. Among the other issues discussed were: - IT measures
- Can a warning be included on trade mark application forms, as many of victims are self-filers?
- EUROPOL’s possibilities to work directly with EUIPO.
- How user associations such as MARQUES can send it misleading invoices to the central repository
- The Czech IP Office gave a presentation on its experiences and best practices (readers may recall that the President of the Czech IP Office, Josef Kratochvil, discussed misleading invoices at the MARQUES Annual Conference in Prague last year).
Finally, the Network discussed plans for the next two years. There are a number of developments to monitor, including new legal cases and new laws concerning gross invoice fraud in Sweden. MARQUES has asked for English translations of the Swedish provisions so that user associations can investigate whether similar laws could become in place in other countries. For more information on this topic, see the Anti-Fraud Task Force page.
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GDPR and the future of WHOIS
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Brand owners and law enforcement agencies are amongst many who rely upon WHOIS to provide information on the registrants of domain names of concern because they infringe rights or support abusive content. Ashley Roberts and Nick Wood report
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Federal Circuit addresses scandalous/offensive marks
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Robert J Kenney discusses the recent decision In re Brunetti; free speech; and the registration of scandalous and offensive trade marks in the United States
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Blockathon to be held in June
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European Commission gives notice that .eu TLD will no longer apply to UK after Brexit
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EUIPO and the European Commission are hosting the Blockathon in Brussels from 22 to 25 June to join the alliance against fake products and to co-create the next level of anti-counterfeiting infrastructure
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EURid, registry operator for .eu for the European Union, has been told to prepare to delete over 300,000 .eu domains owned by registrants based in the UK when the UK leaves the European Union on 30 March 2019. Clare Grimley and Nick Wood provide more information
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Field Notes from the Outer Borders: Petaloso
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In the latest in its series of Field Notes concerning unusual trade marks, Nicoletta Galizia of the IP Emerging Issues Team looks at the race to register trade marks for a new Italian word
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Afghanistan joins Madrid Protocol
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MARQUES Media Roundup
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WIPO has announced that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan deposited its instrument of accession to the Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks on 26 March 2018
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It’s been a bumper month on the MARQUES blogs, with reports on important cases, legislative developments and events. Here are some highlights 
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Issue 088
