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A recent decision (number 5898/2013) of the Full Member Civil Court of First Instance in Athens ruled on the validity of a design (a lid for cups used for hot beverages), examining specific issues regarding the novelty and the individual character of a design.

In H Gautzsch Großhandel GmbH & Co v Münchener Boulevard Möbel Joseph Duna GmbH (MBM) (case C-479/12), the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on specific legal questions regarding Articles 7 (1), 11 (2), 19 (2), 88 and 89 (1) of Council Regulation (EC) No 6/2002 on Community designs.

As mentioned in our previous article, French Polynesia (FP) an overseas community of the French Republic, became autonomous under the organic law of February 27 2004.

Although, technically speaking, the EU regulation on the European unitary patent is already in force, it will only become effective once the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court (UPC) enters into force. This will be four months after the 13th ratification of the agreement, with the proviso that at least Germany, France and the UK have ratified the agreement.

Once again, the recently released EPO statistics reveal an all-time filing record. In 2013, a total of 265,690 European applications were filed with the EPO. This number represents an increase of 2.8% compared to the number of filings in 2012 and a growth of 8.4% relative to 2011.

The ever-growing accessibility, convenience and anonymity offered by e-commerce has permitted counterfeiters to rapidly shift their business models – in some cases entirely – online. To get a sense of the scale of this online scourge all an IP owner need do is to search for their brand on Taobao, Alibaba or other Chinese e-commerce platforms – most of which have a global reach. Those searches will often reveal hundreds, thousands or in some cases millions of advertisements, a large portion of which will be counterfeits.

On October 28 2013, the Guangdong Higher People's Court affirmed the decision made by Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court that InterDigital had abused its dominant market position and thus violated the Anti-Monopoly Law of the People's Republic of China. InterDigital has been ordered to pay Huawei RMB20 million ($3.3 million) in damages. One of the grounds upheld by the courts is that the relevant market should be a collection of the technology licensing market for each patent essential to the 3G telecommunications technologies. This is the first case in China addressing several important issues at the intersection of antitrust law and intellectual property in respect to standard essential patents (SEPs).

In a recent decision, the Federal Court clarified the procedure for disputing trade mark registrations issued in error by the Registrar. The Court held that such registrations cannot be set aside on appeal of the Registrar's decision but must instead be challenged on substantive grounds through cancellation proceedings.

The Brussels Court of Appeal ordered a textile discounter company to pay an indemnification of €600,000 for commercialising bags infringing a bag producer's trade mark in its Belgian and Dutch shops. In an attempt to reduce the damages due, the textile discounter raised, for the first time in appeal, the argument that the Belgian courts would not be competent for the trade mark infringement committed in the Netherlands. The Court of Appeal rejected that argument, and so did the Belgian Supreme Court in its judgment of January 2 2014.

In this issue, we report on a recent decision handed down by the Austrian Supreme Court in a design infringement case.