Way more than an everyday interest in IP
As the year reaches its close, we take a look back at the key Australian developments in intellectual property in 2014, including in patents, trade marks and copyright. Top 3 trade mark developments Cantarella Bros v Modena Trading [2014] HCA 48 A High Court decision on trade marks is always going to be at the read more…
By Keely Fitzpatrick Those who thought that the world of digital currency was beyond the reach of tax and other regulatory authorities have been living in a “Dark Fantasy”. Since our article earlier this year exploring the expansion of digital currencies and the Coinye saga of January 2014 the interest in digital currencies (such as read more…
ATMOsphere: Our regular trade mark series of posts that aim to keep our readers up-to-date on what has been happening in the world of Trade Marks Office decisions. Here, our aim is both to provide a very high level summary of those decisions, and to provide an interesting and useful snapshot of the previous months of read more…
Joseph Shuster (artist) and Jerry Siegel (writer) created the legendary comic book character Superman in 1933, and assigned copyright in the work to Warner Bros subsidiary DC Comics in 1938 – apparently for $130. (Fun fact: the original cheque from DC Comics to Joseph Shuster was recently sold at auction for $160,000! Although we note read more…
Ordinarily, an arbitral tribunal does not have power to order preliminary discovery of documents that would allow a prospective plaintiff to evaluate whether or not sufficient evidence exists to commence a claim. This was one of the findings of the Supreme Court of NSW in a recent case in which a company suspected that a number of its former senior managers and consultants had misused the company’s confidential information or infringed its IP rights. read more…
Search engines are no longer in the dark about how to interpret the now infamous “right to be forgotten” ruling of the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”), handed down in May this year (read our post on the decision here). On Wednesday 26 November, the European data protection authorities assembled in the “Article 29 Working read more…
Is information contained in a document about a residential property “personal information” about the owners or occupants of the property under NSW privacy legislation even if the document doesn’t directly identify the owners or occupants? This was the question that the Appeal Panel of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal had to consider in Office read more…
In October this year we posted on the ACCC’s draft determination on the new edition 18 of Medicines Australia’s Code of Conduct (see more here). As readers of our blog might recall, the ACCC indicated that it would not grant approval to the new edition of the Code unless certain amendments were made to increase read more…
In a landmark trade mark judgment delivered on 3 December 2014, the High Court in Cantarella Bros v Modena Trading [2014] HCA 48 has clarified a critical aspect of Australian trade mark law relating to the test for inherent adaptation to distinguish (inherent distinctiveness) under section 41. The majority of the High Court found that read more…