On 1 January 2014, a new German design law came into force. As a major change to the former law, a new invalidity process is established before the German Patent and Trademark Office. Until now, cancellation of a German design was only available by means of an expensive and time consuming invalidity action before German… more

Open-ended numerical range wording in product claims are common practice in many fields of technology. Examples are features with wording like “at least 20% of…”, “up to 500ml”, i.e. numerical ranges which are open at least one end of the numerical values. 1. Background: The latest developments of the decisions of the Boards of Appeal… more

Contrary to the online resources available at the EPO, until today files at the GPTO could only be manually inspected by either personally inspecting the files at the premises of the GPTO or by ordering copies. The president of the GPTO has now announced that the inspection of patent and utility model files are possible… more

The legal situation In order to remain valid and enforceable, registered trademarks must be genuinely used on the market by their owner or with his consent. Genuine use can also be found if the trademark is used in a form differing in elements which do not alter the distinctive character of the mark in the… more

Initial situation In June 2008, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) – which is responsible for the allocation of Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) – decided to introduce new (generic) TLDs. Within the given time frame, it received 1.930 applications, amongst others TLDs named after trademarks or company names (e.g. “.nike”), regional TLDs (e.g. “.bayern”)… more