Latest blog articles

  • Recently, the General Court in the HELL coffee case has confirmed that a descriptive foreign language term (German word HELL) can be granted protection under EU trade mark law (Hell Energy v. EUIPO, T-323/20).

  • When we talk about Trade Marks Trolls we don’t mean the ugly creature that might come to your mind. Instead, we speak about practices that constitute an abuse of trade mark law. So, how to defend yourself against such behaviour?

  • Influencer marketing and mental health. The global spend on Influencer marketing is expected to reach $15 Billions by 2022, and naturally, brands have grasped how influential social media could be in their marketing campaign. Influencer marketing has grown exponentially, leaving more traditional...

  • Can a single colour alone be a trademark? The question is neither new nor unexplored. However, old wine in a new bottle is presented by the General Court in its decision rejecting an attempt to register a shade of colour for inhalers for asthma and related pharmaceutical preparations, reinstating...

  • Using the trade mark of someone else to describe how your own products relate to the trademark products is allowed under certain circumstances. Recently, the law changed in this respect, leaving the application of some factors uncertain.

  • The coronavirus crisis has given rise to numerous initiatives by governments around the world to combat the pandemic by gathering, sharing, and transferring data, both personal and anonymized. A great deal of attention has been given to proposals for increased data gathering within the EU, and many...

  • The corona virus is causing education to move from offline to online. In the Netherlands, the government and higher education institutions announced last Thursday (12 March 2020) that all in-person education has to be replaced by online education. Online means more reliance on technology. So here...

  • With AI’s recent breakthrough in machine learning, now more than ever inventors are looking for ways to protect AI systems. But obtaining patent protection depends on the right claims.

  • A new copyright reform (Music Modernization Act) was passed in the US Senate in 2018, comprising reforms on the term of protection for works played through online digital music services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora. However, can copyright keep on being repeatedly extended? Is this...

  • E-personhood is a term proposed in a draft report by the EU Parliament, about civil rules and laws on Robotics. This legal status aims at ensuring rights and responsibilities for the most capable AI agents. An intense debate about its usefulness is taking place in the EU.