On 8 November 2019, the Milan IP Court issued an interesting decision (judgment  no. 10130/2019) on trademark infringement in connection with “copycat” websites.

With the decision of last October 3rd, the European Court of Justice (preliminary ruling C-18/18), provided some clarifications on the interpretation of Article 15(1) of EC Directive no. 2000/31.

Last month, I was invited to speak at the LESI YMC event in London (see here for some details), on a panel featuring some very well reputed foreign colleagues, with whom I discussed the options available for Pan-European patent dispute resolution.

With decision no. 18220/2019, the Italian Supreme Court ruled on the violation of the author’s right of paternity due to the failure to mention their name in the publication of their work by third parties.

With judgement no. 29391 dated 4 July 2019, the Criminal Court of Cassation ruled on the matter of patent infringement pursuant to Article 473 of Italian Criminal Code and rejected the appeal proposed by two companies, namely Roofy S.r.l. and Gestico S.r.l., against the Court of Brindisi’s order that had confirmed the criminal seizure of self-leveling spacers for placing tiles, produced and marketed by the appellants and deemed to infringe the patent owned by the counterparty, a company named Brunoplast s.a.s.

On 12 September, the European Court of Justice issued its decision in the G-Star v. Cofemel case no. 683/17, essentially dealing with the possibility of granting copyright protection to clothing designs.

By order no. 146/2019 published at the end of July, the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA) issued specific provisions for the processing of special categories of data in compliance with the GDPR. Herein we will highlight the most important provisions.

Elena Martini will speak on the panel “Pan-European patent dispute resolution – options available under the current system”.

With a judgement dated 6 June 2019 (T-209/18), the EU General Court upheld EUIPO’s decision that found the design of the well-known ‘Porsche 911’ to be invalid.

The Italian Court of Cassation recently overturned a Court of Rome’s decision issued in a libel lawsuit between Ente Autonomo per le Fiere di Verona (“Ente”) and Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso S.p.A. (“l’Espresso”), a publishing company owning, among else, the weekly magazine “L’Espresso”.

With its decision of 16 June 2019 (Case T-307/17), the EU General Court ruled on the appeal filed by Adidas AG (“Adidas”) against the decision of the Second Board of Appeal of EUIPO, relating to invalidity proceedings between Shoe Branding Europe BVBA (“SBE”) and Adidas.

By an order dated 11April 2019, the Italian Data Protection Authority (“Garante per la protezione dei dati personali”) ruled in a case of unsolicited marketing by imposing an exemplary fine of EUR 2 million on Vincall, a company that provides distance marketing and distance selling services on behalf of different companies.

With a recent decision, the Italian Data Protection Authority (“Garante”) provided some useful guidelines regarding the data breach procedure in case of a personal data violation.

A recent decision of the Court of Turin (no. 940/2019), finding that the image rights of the famous Hollywood diva Audrey Hepburn had been unlawfully exploited, marked a new victory for her heirs (in favour of whom the Court of Milan had already ruled with its decision no. 766/2015).

The Court of Cassation, by order no. 9500 of 04 April 2019, ruled again on the necessity of staying infringement proceedings when the proceeding on the patent’s invalidity is pending.

By order of 6 May 2019, the Milan IP Court ruled in favour of the owner of a well-known textile brand against a retailer who marketed its products in substantially undervaluing ways, and which was therefore enjoined from this activity.

With a recent judgement, the EU General Court ruled on the matter of visual and conceptual similarity between signs and, overturning EUIPO’s decision, found that the well-known Apple trademark and the Pear trademark (shown below) cannot be confused.

With its decision no. 7708 of 19 March 2019 in the lawsuit brought by RTI against Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo! Italia Srl (herein, Yahoo!) the Italian Court of Cassation established key principles on the hosting provider’s liability; the decision will probably become the landmark precedent for online infringement litigations in the next years.

With a decision dated 2 May 2019, the European Court of Justice (C-614/17) ruled on three preliminary questions raised by the Tribunal Supremo (the Spanish Supreme Court), concerning the interpretation of Article 13(1)(b) of Regulation EC no. 2006/510 in the matter of protection of designations of origin (PDOs) against unlawful evocations.

With decision no. 7709/2019, the Court of Cassation ruled again on the Internet Service Provider’s liability – an issue of which we talked about amongst others here and here on this blog.