Merkenrecht  

IEF 89

Overlijden gemachtigde geen reden voor uitstel oppositietermijn

In de zaak DA Paloma Santaolalla Martínez v Steyerberger Bekleidungswerk GmbH heeft de Kamer van Beroep van het OHIM geoordeeld dat de termijn voor het indienen van een oppositie ingevolge de Gemeenschapsverordening alleen terzijde kan worden geschoven als er hiervoor 'compelling reasons' zijn. In casu blijkt dat het overlijden van de merkengemachtigde van de opposant niet kan worden gezien als 'compelling reason'.

Ironisch is dat het in casu het gemeenschapsmerk NICE DAY betrof dat werd aangevochten door het Spaanse bedrijf DA Paloma Santaolalla Martínez op basis van het oudere, identieke merk NICE DAY.

Met dank aan: Philippe de Jong, Altius, Brussel

IEF 87

Merkenrecht

Arrest GvEA EG, 1 maart 2005, zaak T-185/03 Fusco / OHMI - Fusco International (ENZO)

In casu is het Gerecht van oordeel dat het element „Fusco" (een niet zo veel voorkomende familienaam) de Italiaanse consument eerder zal bijblijven dan de voornamen „Antonio" of „Enzo" doordat hij aan de familienaam doorgaans een groter onderscheidend vermogen toekent dan aan de voornaam. Bovendien zijn de betrokken waren dezelfde. In deze omstandigheden heeft de kamer van beroep niet van een verkeerde rechtsopvatting blijk gegeven door te oordelen dat, wanneer een consument wordt geconfronteerd met een waar die is voorzien van het aangevraagde merk ENZO FUSCO, hij dat merk kan verwarren met het oudere merk ANTONIO FUSCO, zodat er sprake is van verwarringsgevaar.
IEF 86

US Trademark Judge Finds New Horor

Een verschrikkelijk bericht in de New York Times: "Haunted by Threats, U.S. Trademark Judge Finds New Horor. For Joan Humphrey Lefkow, the nightmare began shortly after her appointment as a federal judge in 2000, when an Oregon group's lawsuit to block white supremacists from using a name it had trademarked, World Church of the Creator, landed in her lap. Soon, Judge Lefkow found her home address and family photographs posted along with violent threats on hate-filled Web sites. Last April, one of the Aryan movement's most notorious leaders was convicted of plotting her murder.

In the case she handled involving Mr. Hale's church Judge Lefkow had little choice but to order Mr. Hale to remove the World Church name from his Web sites and printed material or face fines of $1,000 a day.She was immediately vilified. Hal Turner, an "underground" radio personality who broadcasts on a shortwave signal, said on his show that Judge Lefkow was "worthy of being killed," adding that "it wouldn't be legal, but in my opinion it wouldn't be wrong."  NYTimes

March 2, 2005

Haunted by Threats, U.S. Judge Finds New Horror

By JODI WILGOREN

 

CHICAGO, March 1 - For Joan Humphrey Lefkow, the nightmare began shortly after her appointment as a federal judge in 2000, when an Oregon group's lawsuit to block white supremacists from using a name it had trademarked, World Church of the Creator, landed in her lap.

 

Soon, Judge Lefkow found her home address and family photographs posted along with violent threats on hate-filled Web sites. Last April, one of the Aryan movement's most notorious leaders was convicted of plotting her murder.

 

On Tuesday, Judge Lefkow was under armed federal guard in an undisclosed place, mourning the deaths of Michael F. Lefkow, her husband of 30 years, and Donna Humphrey, her 89-year-old mother, whom she found dead of gunshots to the head in their basement the evening before.

 

"I think she's very upset with herself, maybe, for being a judge and putting her family in this danger," said Laura Lefkow, 20, the third of the judge's five daughters, "but there's no way she should have known."

 

Local and federal law enforcement officials said on Tuesday they were investigating possible connections between the double killing and Matthew Hale, the white supremacist now in federal prison awaiting sentencing for soliciting Judge Lefkow's assassination, or his many sympathizers. Federal officials in Washington said agents were reviewing Judge Lefkow's caseload in search of suspects, with the main thrust on the hate groups that had focused on her before.

 

Already, some white supremacists were celebrating the killings on the Internet, while others spun conspiracy theories that the crime had been committed by Mr. Hale's enemies to poison the atmosphere before his sentencing next month. Experts who have spent years tracking Mr. Hale's organization, now called Creativity, also pointed to the sentencing, recalling that one of his acolytes, Benjamin Smith, went on a shooting spree in 1999 after Mr. Hale, who had passed the Illinois bar exam, was denied a license to practice law.

 

"We saw what happened the last time Matt Hale got slapped in the face by the system; the price of that was two dead and nine severely wounded," said Mark Potok, director of intelligence for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. "Now Matt Hale is about to be sentenced, very probably, to most of his natural life to federal prison. It's very possible that a Hale follower or sympathizer has decided to fight back."

 

Billy Roper, a friend of Mr. Hale who leads a group called White Revolution, disavowed the violence but offered a different parallel: the F.B.I.'s 1992 confrontation in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, with the white separatist Randall C. Weaver, whose wife and 14-year-old son wound up dead.

 

"We can stand alongside the federal law enforcement community in saying just as they felt a deep regret and sadness over the death of Randy Weaver's family, so we also feel a deep sense of regret and sadness over the death of Judge Lefkow's family," Mr. Roper said. "If it was the case that someone was misguided and thought that they were helping Matt Hale, then it would be similar in that other people had suffered for one person's mistake."

 

Mr. Hale, who faces up to 40 years in prison, has been held for two years in the Metropolitan Correctional Center here under special administrative measures reserved for terrorists that limit contact with the outside world.

 

Federal officials refused to discuss the restrictions, but Mr. Hale's mother, Evelyn Hutcheson, said that she and his father were the only people with whom he was allowed contact and that they were limited to 15-minute phone calls each Thursday morning and hourlong visits twice a month.

 

"He had nothing to do with what went on last night," Ms. Hutcheson said in a telephone interview Tuesday from her home in East Peoria, Ill. "My son is sitting in a hole where he's not allowed to even speak loud enough to be audible."

 

"Common sense would tell you, if he were into having somebody kill somebody - which he is not - would he have somebody go kill the judge's family just before he's sentenced?" she added. "Somebody has done this to make him get an enhanced sentence."

 

The authorities warned that it was too soon to fix on any one theory of the crime, though they did not offer other possible accounts or motives.

 

James Molloy, the Chicago Police Department's chief of detectives, said the two people were killed between 10:30 a.m., when Ms. Humphrey answered a telephone call from one of her granddaughters, and 5:30 p.m. when the judge returned home. At 4 p.m., the Lefkows' youngest daughter, Margaret, 16, went home to get her gym bag and left without seeing anyone, Chief Molloy said.

 

"There is much speculation about possible links between this crime and the possible involvement of hate groups," he said at a news conference. "This is but one facet of our investigation. We are looking in many, many directions."

 

Beth Sycamore, who lives three houses from the Lefkows, said the couple strolled the neighborhood holding hands and took the El train, even with the death threats.

 

"She wasn't afraid," Ms. Sycamore said of the judge. "They just didn't want it to affect their lives."

 

Shannon Metzger, a spokeswoman for the United States Marshals Service, said that Judge Lefkow had a special protective detail for "a couple of weeks" last year but that it was disbanded when the threats against her were deemed "not viable." Mr. Molloy said the Chicago police had also stopped sending cars to her home for extra patrols, and Laura Lefkow said the authorities had long ago removed the security cameras they had installed in their home.

 

"I guess because the F.B.I. felt it seemed like there was no danger," said Ms. Lefkow, a sophomore at Pomona College in Southern California.

 

On Monday night, federal marshals met Ms. Lefkow's plane from Los Angeles, and they stood guard Tuesday as the family planned Saturday funerals for Mrs. Humphrey and Mr. Lefkow, a lawyer who was a leader in the Episcopal Church.

 

Mr. Lefkow, who ran unsuccessfully for Cook County judge in 2002 and 2004, argued two cases before the United States Supreme Court and worked for the Legal Aid Society and the United States Postal Service before starting a private practice about 20 years ago. He spent every Sunday at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Evanston, and since 1992 had been a lay member of the governing committee of the Chicago Diocese of the Episcopal Church.

 

Mr. Lefkow met his future wife in the library of Wheaton College, where she was an undergraduate. "She was doing a paper on Indonesia, and he was doing a paper on Indonesia, and she had all his books," Laura Lefkow recounted of her parents' first encounter. "He used to say he was rich in daughters and not much else," she laughed. "He was just an optimist about everything, to the point where it was like, 'Oh, my gosh, Dad, come on,' and he would be like, 'It'll be fine,' and it was. It was always fine."

 

Mrs. Humphrey, who lived in a town house in Denver, had been staying with the judge's family since before Christmas as she recovered from a kidney infection. Neighbors in Denver said she played solitaire and Scrabble on a computer and frequently cooked large meals for friends. She hand-stitched quilts for each of her 23 descendants.

 

Judge Lefkow, a magistrate judge since 1982, was named to the United States District Court by President Bill Clinton. In the case she handled involving Mr. Hale's church, she initially ruled in favor of Mr. Hale, dismissing the trademark case in 2002.

 

After an appeals court reversed her decision, though, Judge Lefkow had little choice but to order Mr. Hale to remove the World Church name from his Web sites and printed material or face fines of $1,000 a day.

 

She was immediately vilified. Hal Turner, an "underground" radio personality who broadcasts on a shortwave signal, said on his show that Judge Lefkow was "worthy of being killed," adding that "it wouldn't be legal, but in my opinion it wouldn't be wrong."

 

Mr. Hale, who called himself pontifex maximus of the church that at one point claimed 30,000 members, was arrested in January 2003, after an F.B.I. informant infiltrated the group to become his security chief.

 

The informant, Anthony Evola, provided an e-mail message in which Mr. Hale sought Judge Lefkow's home address and a tape recording of their discussing her fate. "We going to exterminate the rat?" Mr. Evola asked. Mr. Hale said that he preferred to "fight within the law" but that "if you wish to, ah, do anything yourself, you can, you know?"

 

When Mr. Evola said, "Consider it done," Mr. Hale responded, "Good."

 

Mr. Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said that after Mr. Hale's arrest his group foundered, shrinking from a high in the 1990's of 88 chapters to 5 in 2003. But he said it jumped to at least 16 chapters last year and remains one of the nation's most violent groups.

 

Sympathizers abound. "Everyone associated with the Matt Hale trial has deserved assassination for a long time," read an Internet essay posted Tuesday by Bill White, editor of The Libertarian Socialist News. "I don't feel bad that Judge Lefkow's family was murdered today. In fact, when I heard the story, I laughed."

 

 

David Bernstein and Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting from Chicago for this article, Mindy Sink from Denver and David Johnston from Washington.

IEF 85

Benelux-Verdrag inzake intellectuele eigendom

In de  nieuwe nieuwbrief van het BMB staat de volgende paragraaf: Het “Benelux-Verdrag inzake intellectuele eigendom” is inmiddels getekend door België en Luxemburg. De handtekening van Nederland verwachten wij tegen het eind van februari. Daarmee krijgt het Verdrag zijn datum en kunnen vervolgens de drie nationale goedkeuringsprocedures in gang worden gezet. De tekst van het nieuwe verdrag en de memorie van toelichting van de regeringen worden op dat moment op de website van het BMB geplaatst. Het nieuwe verdrag treedt naar verwachting op 1 januari 2006 in werking. " Waarom tekst en toelichting pas 'op dat moment' worden gepubliceerd staat er helaas niet bij.

IEF 83

Public Trademark no. 1

Gokje: dit wordt het onderwerp van de volgende column van Bas Kist: Swiss recognise Bin Ladin trademark. Yeslam Binladin, a half-brother of Osama bin Laden, has been given the go-ahead to market products under the brand name Bin Ladin. A Swiss appeals committee on Thursday said it had overturned an earlier decision by the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property to revoke the trademark licence on the grounds that the name was "morally offensive". Explaining its decision, which was taken in June 2004 but has only just been made public, the appeals body said it did not believe that use of the trademark constituted a threat to public order, as claimed by the federal institute.

IEF 77

Emergente Merken

Voor wie dacht dat met het merkenjargon met alle woord-, beeld-, kleur-, geur- en klankmerken wel zo'n beetje was uitgeput, introduceert Nauta-advocaat Olav Schmutzer in zijn in de nieuwste IER gepubliceerde artikel "Weigeren voor een hoger doel" de term Emergente Merken. Naar aanleiding van het Postkantoorcriterium stelt hij: "Het is misschien aardig om deze leer van het Hof met een verwijzing naar de metafysica aan te duiden als 'merken-emergentisme. Indien een samengesteld merk ontstijgt aan de haar delen en zo kan rekenen op de goedkeuring van het Hof, kan dan gesproken worden van een 'emergent merk'. Het is afwachten of de term beklijft, maar metafysicus Schmutzer laat in ieder geval zien dat het merkenrecht niet zo oppervlakkig is als door sommigen wel wordt aangenomen

IEF 76

Leve het merkenrecht!

Persbericht Sanoma Uitgevers: 'Het seniorenblad Vive Magazine, uitgegeven door TOPpers, moet vanaf het tweede nummer van 2005 haar naam wijzigen. Dit is de uitslag van het kort geding, dat was aangespannen door het vrouwenblad Viva, uitgegeven door Sanoma Uitgevers.
In het vonnis stelt de rechtbank dat de namen Viva en Vive te sterk op elkaar lijken. Tevens is onderkend dat Viva een sterk merk is met een grote naamsbekendheid en een groot onderscheidend vermogen. De rechtbank is daarom van mening dat Toppers met het tijdschrift Vive magazine ongerechtvaardigd voordeel trekt uit de op Viva gelijkende naam. Tevens staat Viva in haar recht op te treden tegen verwatering van haar merk.'
Hoofdredacteur Monique van Diessen van Vive Magazine in een reactie op bovenstaand bericht: 'Het zit toch ietsje anders in elkaar. De rechter heeft namelijk in haar vonnis gesteld dat er volgens haar geen verwarring zou kunnen ontstaan tussen Viva en Vive Magazine. De reden dat zij toch wil dat wij onze naam wijzigen is dat onze naam mogelijk zou kunnen leiden tot verwatering van het merk Viva. Wij mogen dus nog gewoon het eerste nummer uitbrengen onder de naam Vive Magazine en de door Sanoma geeiste schadevergoedingen zijn ook niet toegekend.'

 
IEF 74

Inburgering merk in de gehele Benelux?

Over de vraag of een merk in de gehele Benelux moet zijn ingeburgerd of slechts in een (aanmerkelijk) deel, zijn de meningen verdeeld. Maar binnen afzienbare tijd komt hierop eindelijk een antwoord. Het Hof ’s-Gravenhage heeft namelijk hierover vragen gesteld aan het HvJ EG/BenGH. Dit alles is terug te vinden in het beroep dat is ingesteld tegen de weigering van het depot EUROPOLIS d.d. 27 januari 2005 (rekest nr. R98/474).

IEF 73

Nieuwe wetbundels voor Rechtbank Zwolle?

In een vonnis inzake een inbreuk op een handelsnaam en merkrecht van de onderneming Protect Eye door een oud-werknemer doet Rechtbank Zwolle een opmerkelijke uitspraak. 

In rechtsoverweging 3.6.3 overweegt de rechtbank “dat gedaagde heeft betwist dat hij inbreuk maakt op een merkrecht van Protect Eye. Hij heeft daartoe aangevoerd dat hij zijn naam niet gebruikt in het economisch verkeer.”. Volgens de rechtbank treft dit verweer doel, aangezien “voor een succesvol beroep op artikel 13A lid 1 aanhef en onder d BMW dient vast te staan dat er sprake is van gebruik in het economisch verkeer. Volgens vaste rechtspraak is daarvan sprake wanneer het gebruik van merk of teken plaatsvindt, anders dan met een uitsluitend wetenschappelijk doel in het kader van een bedrijf, van een beroep of enige andere niet in de particuliere sfeer verrichte activiteit, waarmee economisch voordeel wordt beoogd. Zoals hiervoor reeds is overwogen, is commercieel gebruik van de site of gebruik waarbij enig economisch voordeel wordt beoogd niet aannemelijk geworden. Het beroep van Protect Eye op artikel 13A lid 1 aanhef en onder d BMW gaat derhalve alleen om deze reden al niet op.”

Deze uitspraak van 22 september 2004 is op zijn minst opmerkelijk te noemen, aangezien het begrip “in het economisch” verkeer reeds sinds 1 januari 2004 niet meer terug te vinden is in artikel 13A lid 1 sub d BMW. Zo zie je maar, nooit bezuinigen op wetteksten. (voor de volledige uitspraak zie: LJN: AS5108, Rb. Zwolle, 100304 / KG ZA 04-358)