EUIPO BoA IP Case Law Conference Report #7 – “Quality through Coherence and Consistency: Reflections and Visions”

This Kat closes the reporting on the EUIPO’s 5th IP Case Law Conference, hosted in Alicante by the EUIPO Boards of Appeal (BoA). The last session of the conference dwelled upon soft law instruments at the disposal of intellectual property (IP) offices and courts to achieve high-quality decisions.

EUIPO Boards of Appeal’s perspective

Gordon Humphreys, interim president of the EUIPO BoA, opened the session with a presentation titled “Contributing to Trade Mark and Design Harmonization in the European Union: Trailblazing at the Boards of Appeal”. The BoA shape trade mark and design law not only in the European Union (EU), but also in third countries, where their decisions are widely commented in the blogs [and cited by local offices and courts!]. This calls for high-quality rulings that would both be coherent and flexibly reflect modern-day challenges. To achieve that, the BoA employs a series of instruments that Mr. Humphreys presented to the audience, including the eSearch Case Law tool, research reports, Grand Board referrals [see The IPKat here], as well as the Convergence Programme.

Harmonisation through convergence

Ms. Joana de Moura followed on the topic, by presenting the EUIPO’s Convergence Programme (CP) for trade mark and design law. This initiative, launched by the EUIPO in 2013, allows the EUIPO and national offices of the Member States to agree on issues of law where there is still divergence at the case-law level. After reaching an agreement on issues such as criteria for assessing disclosure of designs on the Internet, the EUIPO and national offices implement them into their decisional practice. Ms. De Moura then presented in detail two most recent CPs, CP13 “Trade Mark Applications Made in Bad Faith” and CP14 “Trade Marks Contrary to Public Policy or to Accepted Principles of Morality”.

 
A Member State’s perspective

Prof. Dr. Volker Michael Jänich, Judge at the Thuringian Higher Regional Court, shared his views on achieving quality of judicial decisions. After pondering on the difficulty to define the concept of quality, Prof. Volker presented legal tools at the disposal of German judiciary to achieve it. These include specialisation in certain areas of law, as well as a strive to avoid single judge decisions.

Predictability through EUIPO’s Guidelines

The session closed with a presentation by Mr. Dimitris Botis, Director of the Legal Department at the EUIPO. Mr. Botis discussed the evolution and the role of EUIPO’s Guidelines for Trade Marks and Designs. Mr. Botis explained how the Guidelines are “fed” with various sources of practices, including not only acquis acts and Court of Justice’s and BoA case-law, but also the input from the EUIPO’s Knowledge Circles, the BoA Consistency Reports, and contributions from the BoA Litigation Unit. During the Guidelines’ revision, the EUIPO also receives ample feedback from the stakeholders, which contributes to their quality. As already mentioned in Session 6, the EUIPO is currently working on the new Guidelines for geographical indications that will be adopted in 2025.

And the best question award goes to…

The two-days conference ended with closing remarks from Mr. Humphreys and the delivery of the award for the best question from the audience. Antonios Baris, our Book Review Editor, received the prize for best question for his question on pertinence of legally allowing overlaps between trade marks and copyright!

The IPKat team and Katfriends would like to thank the EUIPO for hosting us during this marvellous event, and we look forward to the next edition of the conference.