In case you ever wondered what MARQUES gets up to, this short report by Laetitia, posted on her behalf by Jeremy, should give you a good idea of its scope of activity. Laetitia reports:

During the second day of the Spring Meeting at the Marriott Hotel, Amsterdam, MARQUES teams presented their yearly achievements and ongoing projects. Those included the amicus curiae team filing briefs or statements in important cases regarding the future of 3D trade marks in  Europe and in WTO proceedings. The intellectual asset management team is doing a project monitoring management of TM crises. The unfair competition team has done some interesting research on the consumer perception of TMs from a psychological point of view and a comparative study on how judges give weight to surveys in litigation.

The Madrid Protocol team covered the new accession by 6 members in 2013 (Mexico, Tunisia, Colombia, India, Philipines, New Zealand was the most designated country, with a record amount of 310 applications filed). The TM law & practice team has a Workshop for in-house counsel on the strategy of protecting one's assets by filing for 3D marks and designs. The regulatory team continues to focus on the fascinating debate over "plain packaging" and the world wide legislation on that aspect. The brands and marketing team is organizing a cross-jurisdictional study of revocation for non-use actions, an article on protection of eco-labels and revival of trade marks.

The IP outer borders team continues to explore emerging trends such as localism, crowd sourcing of trade marks, indigenous rights and the human rights intersection with IP. The programming team revealed some of the next events such as a coexistence agreement workshop in Italy and a meeting with CTM judges. The designs team is contemplating submitting a paper for the proposed revision of the Community Design regulation.

Other teams such as the cyberspace team, the China team and the GI team are of course keeping very busy and we invite the readers to check out the respective teams pages to find out more.

We all look forward to the next conference to expose some of those ongoing projects through panels and sessions. See you in Copenhagen!