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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but not so far as spare parts are concerned. This is the implication of a recent judgment by the Supreme Court of Appeal, in which the court dismissed an appeal by BMW to an earlier ruling by the North Gauteng High Court.

Apple and Samsung are fighting litigation with each other all over the world, and Japan is no exception. Here we run through the outcomes and implications of the three cases.

The assessment of the distinctiveness of trade marks consisting of a slogan remains a difficult issue before patent offices and courts throughout Europe.

Any human activity that causes damage creates the need to implement reparatory mechanisms. A party infringing a trade mark uses a good that does not belong to them and accomplishes this misappropriation to obtain a benefit.

Fashion companies often use their distinctive house marks in conjunction with multiple secondary marks to serve as a single source identifier for their product lines. The house mark groups the multiple different product offerings under the solitary heading of a well-known brand. The inclusion of the house mark could play a pivotal role in determining whether a likelihood of confusion exists between two otherwise similar marks.

In the June 2012 issue of Managing IP, we reported on a novel calculation of application fees at the German PTO. While there was some ambiguity in the wording of the new law on costs in patent affairs, the legislator has now confirmed in proposed amendments to the law that, upon nationalisation of a PCT application, based on the number of claims as originally filed, fees must be paid for each claim in excess of 10 claims (€20/€30 for electronic/paper filing). Thus, for applications with a high number of original claims, substantial additional fees must be paid with no option for reduction by reducing the number of claims upon entry into the German national phase.

Recently, there was a trade mark case that was as obvious and clear as possible. It actually confirmed a precedent that should have been applied assertively and without hesitation, yet somehow was still debatable when overseen by the Mexican Trademark Office (MTO).

In a recent decision, the Quebec Court of Appeal upheld a trial judge's decision to reject the evidence of an expert in a trade mark passing-off matter because the expert's report sought to describe the perception of a casual consumer. In doing so, the Court of Appeal affirmed the earlier decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Masterpiece v Alavida Lifestyles which held that expert evidence is not necessary where it just assesses resemblance between two trade marks by a casual consumer.

A recent case before the Athens single-member court of first instance concerned the infringement of a trade mark through the parallel import of vehicles into Greece from countries outside the EEA without the consent of the mark's proprietor. The infringer's defence was to challenge the concept of Community exhaustion of a trade mark right.

A recent decision by the French Supreme Court (June 11 2013) seems to open a strategy for trade mark owners that were victims of infringement and did not react in time.