Standards to be set for non-traditional marks The member states of the Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks have agreed to define rules for representing non-traditional marks in trade mark applications. The rules will cover hologram, motion, colour, position and sound marks.

The Singapore Treaty was adopted in March 2006 and establishes office administration rules for trade mark applications. It has 20 contracting parties.

French government appoints IP Office head France's Ministry of Economics has appointed Philippe Laval as head of the country's IP Office, following the election of former director-general Benoît Battistelli as president of the EPO.

Laval, the deputy director-general of INPI, took over on July 1, the day that Battistelli began work in Munich. The appointment is a temporary one and a permanent successor is expected to be announced within weeks.

Intangible assets fuel Diageo pension deal Drinks company Diageo is using the value in its whisky brands to top up its pension scheme, in the latest example of pension funds being funded by non-traditional assets.

However, most other such deals have involved real estate. In the Diageo case, the value of the assets being transferred is largely due to the value of the whisky brands concerned – although the company is understood to be retaining ownership of the IP rights in the brands.

Engineering company GKN PLC recently announced a pension funding partnership (PFP) with income coming from both real estate and royalty income from trade marks.

Diageo has agreed a 10-year funding plan with the trustee of its pension scheme, which had a deficit of £862 million ($1.3 billion) when it was last valued in April 1 2009.

As part of the plan, a PFP is to be formed for 15 years. This will hold maturing whisky spirits worth some £500 million. The company has an option to buy £25 million worth of the whisky from the partnership each year, with the income funding the pension scheme.

CJ sets outs AdWords defence in Portakabin case Europe's highest court has struck another blow for advertisers in its latest decision concerning trade mark infringement in Google's AdWords programme.

Ruling in July in a referral from the Netherlands, the Court of Justice of the EU said that use of another's trade mark as a keyword in online advertising can be prohibited by the trade mark owner under Article 5 of the Trade Marks Directive.

But it added that, in the case of a reseller, the advertiser may have a defence under Article 7 of the Directive, which concerns exhaustion of trade mark rights.

The questions arose in a case before the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (Supreme Court of the Netherlands) between brand owner Portakabin and advertiser Primakabin, which had bought the keywords portakabin, portacabin, portokabin and portocabin in Google's AdWords programme. Google was not a party to this dispute.

Primakabin sold second-hand Portakabin goods as well as goods under other brands.

In its opinion, the Court endorsed its earlier ruling in a case between Google and LVMH that use of a trade mark as a keyword is use "in the course of trade" and can have an adverse effect on the indication of origin function of the trade mark.

EU patent proposal backs machine translations Applicants for the proposed EU patent will be able to file in just one language, under a proposal published by the European Commission on July 1.

The proposal for a Council Regulation on translation arrangements follows a Regulation published last December setting out the rules for the EU patent. A separate Regulation on translations is needed partly due to the Lisbon Treaty and partly due to political sensitivities about languages.

Under the proposal, EU patents will be examined and granted in either English, French or German. The claims will be translated into the other two official languages of the EPO.

In the event of a legal dispute, the patent owner will have to provide further translations, for example into the language of the defendant or that of the court, at his own expense.

Applicants in EU countries that do not use English, French or German will be able to file patents in their own language. These applications will have to be translated into one of the EPO's three official languages. The Commission says these translation costs will be fully reimbursable, up to fixed ceilings, with the money coming from the revenues generated by EU patent applications.

The Commission claims the proposal would lead to the average cost of a patent covering the 27 EU member states being cut from about €20,000 to less than €6,200.

The proposal is still likely to meet opposition, in particular from countries that do not have English, French or German as official languages, such as Spain, Italy and Portugal.

They are likely to oppose any system that downgrades their languages to second-class status, and makes it harder for inventors to access accurate patent information in their own tongue. It is also likely that patent professionals in those countries would lose work if manual translations were replaced by machine ones.

The Commission's proposal will now be submitted to the Council and European Parliament. To be adopted, it needs unanimous support from all EU member states in the Council. Given this requirement, it remains unlikely that the EU patent will be introduced any time soon.

AstraZeneca ruling could mean more competition cases The European Commission could be more likely to take action against IP owners for blocking competition, after a court endorsed its 2005 decision that AstraZeneca had abused its dominant position by preventing the marketing of generic rivals to its blockbuster drug Losec.

It agreed with the Commission that the pharmaceutical company committed two abuses of a dominant position.

First, AstraZeneca made misleading representations to national patent offices in various EU member states to obtain supplementary protection certificates for Losec by withholding the date on which it obtained the first marketing authorisation.

Second, it deregistered the Losec capsule marketing authorisations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden to delay and make more difficult the marketing of generic medicinal products and prevent parallel imports.

However, the Court found there was not sufficient evidence that the deregistrations restricted parallel imports in Norway and Denmark, and therefore reduced the fine imposed by the Commission from a total of €60 million to €52.5 million.

AstraZeneca can appeal the decision, on points of law only, to the Court of Justice of the EU.

Competition specialists said the decision could embolden the Commission and national competition authorities to take action against perceived competition abuses involving IP rights.

Last year the European Commission published the results of its 18-month enquiry into the pharmaceutical sector. While the enquiry stopped short of recommending specific action, it did highlight concerns over the competition impact of patent thickets and settlement agreements in the industry.

Court of Appeal judge becomes academic Lord Justice Robin Jacob of the Court of Appeal in London has been appointed as the first holder of the Sir Hugh Laddie Chair in Intellectual Property Law at University College London (UCL).

The chair is funded by charitable contributions and is named after Hugh Laddie, another former judge who founded UCL's Institute of Brand and Innovation Law.

Jacob will take up the post in 2011 while continuing to sit part-time in the Court of Appeal.

UK relaxes product placement rules Brand owners may soon be able to pay to showcase their products in TV programmes shown in the UK, after the country's communications watchdog said it proposes to allow product placement.

At the moment, programme makers are banned by Ofcom's Broadcasting Code from showing or referring to particular brands in return for money from advertisers. But changes have been made to EU law to relax the rules on product placement.

Now the watchdog wants to amend its own Code to clarify what brand owners can do to promote their products and services within TV shows.

It has now published a set of proposals, which are open for consultation until September 17. Ofcom says it expects to publish a revised Code by the end of the year.

The proposals say that product placement should be permitted in films, TV series, sports programmes and entertainment programmes, but that advertisers will not be allowed to pay to have their products appear in children's programmes and in religious, current affairs or consumer affairs programmes that are produced in the UK.

The ban on product placement in programmes shown on the state-owned BBC will remain.