2020-12-01 @ 13:00 – 16:00 CET
Speaker: Gordon Humphreys
With appeals from decisions in Alicante now accounting for approximately one third of all cases handled by the General Court in Luxembourg, the work of the EUIPO has truly come onto the center stage.
However, while judgments of the General Court are important in determining the direction that European trade mark law takes, the work of the EUIPO Boards of Appeal should not be ignored – not least because only some 11 percent of cases decided by the Boards end-up being appealed to Luxembourg.
The significance of those figures is further compounded by the fact that approximately 75-80 percent of appeals to Luxembourg result in the decisions of the Boards being confirmed. For trademark practitioners, this means that the EUIPO Boards of Appeal are the face of the front line. After over 23 years of existence, the Boards have built up a corpus of jurisprudence, which is of tremendous practical significance to those engaging with the EUIPO.
This lecture therefore focuses on some of the most recent and important case law of the Boards of Appeal dealing with both absolute and relative ground of refusal.
