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A serious reference -- or is someone winding us up?

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

The IPKat still can't find it on the Curia website, but lurking somewhere in the netherworld of Court of Justice web pages is a new reference to for a preliminary ruling. It's Case C-190/10 GÉNESIS SEGUROS GENERALES SOCIEDAD ANÓNIMA DE SEGUROS Y REASEGUROS v BOYS TOYS S.A. and ADMINISTRACIÓN DEL ESTADO (Merpel hopes there's nothing significant about the fact that the parties' names are in capital letters -- it looks like shouting). Anyway, this case raises the following question:

"May Article 27 of Council Regulation ... 40/94 of 20 December 1993 on the Community trade mark [now repealed and replaced by Regulation 207/2009] be interpreted in such a way as to enable account to be taken not only of the day but also of the hour and minute of filing of an application for registration of a Community trade mark with OHIM (provided that such information has been recorded) for the purposes of establishing temporal priority over a national trade mark application filed on the same day, where the national legislation governing the registration of national trade marks considers the time of filing to be relevant?"

The IPKat thanks the UK's Intellectual Property Office for its excellent service in drawing the attention of businesses, practitioners and beleaguered bloggers to the existence of fresh references to the Court (including this one), and for giving interested parties (brand owners, their enemies, horologists?) a chance to make comments by email here so that the Office can decide whether to take a position on it.

For the record, Article 27 states:

"The date of filing of a Community trade mark application shall be the date on which documents containing the information specified in Article 26(1) [= application details + request for grant + fee] are filed with the Office by the applicant or, if the application has been filed with the central office of a Member State or with the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property, with that office, subject to payment of the application fee within a period of one month of filing the abovementioned documents".

The IPKat notes that there are two types of trade mark cases that go to the Court of Justice. There are references for preliminary rulings from national courts, which require interpretation of Directive 2008/95, and there are appeals from the General Court on Community trade mark matters, which require consideration of Regulation 207/2009. This case is unusual, being a reference from a national court that focuses on the Regulation. Merpel is just bursting to know what the background is to this reference. Please, PLEASE will one or more of this weblog's enthusiastic readers put her out of her misery and tell her!

Full post as published by IPKat on June 01, 2010 (boomark / email).