CONFERENCE CALL
ECTA CONFERENCE REVIEW
More than 800 delegates flocked to Sicily for ECTA’s 31st annual conference, as WIPR reports.
Attorneys, practitioners and in-house counsel from across the world attended the three-day European Communities Trade Mark Association’s (ECTA) conference in Palermo, the island’s main city.
Counterfeiting in China—a hot topic for trademark owners—was the subject of the opening day’s only public session: Filing and Enforcement Strategies in China. Pedro Velasco Martins, deputy head of intellectual property and public procurement at the European Commission (EC), explained that in 2010, 85 percent of counterfeit goods seized within European borders came from China—a “sobering” figure. Martins handed over to Horace Lam, partner at law firm Jones Day in Beijing, who joked about the many “horror” stories he could tell about counterfeiting in China. Lam urged attendees to understand the country’s filing system, which is ‘first-to-file’ and has no use requirement. “Te lesson to learn is that if you don’t give yourself a trademark in China, someone will give you one,” he said, provoking laughter and applause in the audience.
To illustrate his point, Lam told the story of Jeremy Lin, the professional US basketball player who shot to stardom almost overnight. Aſter a mediocre start to his career, Lin was engulfed by a wave of popularity earlier this year following several impressive performances for the New
York Knicks. Te ensuing ‘Linsanity’ soon swept across China, the birthplace of Lin’s parents. Lam said that as a result of this new found fame, a company began trading under the name ‘Jeremy Lin’, making and selling legitimate products.
According to Lam, many brands are still not protected in China and, historically, businesses have paid large sums of money to acquire their trademarks. He repeated that to beat the counterfeiters, practitioners must understand the system, calculate their budgets, and most importantly, have a strategy. “Do not blindly target the infringers,” he advised.
Patsy Lau, partner at law firm Deacons in Hong Kong, then explained that registering Chinese- character trademarks was crucial for Western companies because “95 percent of China speaks Chinese as their first language”. Patrick Marichal, trademark manager at Solvay in Belgium, added that the Chinese IP system could “live without us” and emphasised that Westerners should avoid “being the teacher” and should “try to understand the system”.
On the second day, ECTA’s annual general meeting kicked off proceedings before the official welcome address, given by the association’s president Annick Mottet Haugaard. A packed conference hall soon turned its attention to the day’s first session: Headlines in Trade Marks in Designs. Peter
14 World Intellectual Property Review July/August 2012
Mueller, ECTA’s second vice president-turned news anchorman for the morning, played a recorded interview with Francis Gurry, director general at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Gurry said the two foremost challenges facing trademark owners were to ensure that legislation and regulation “maintained relevance” and “avoided a loss of coherence”. Pointing to multiple international agreements, he questioned the level of coherence and asked: “How do we ensure that this makes sense?” Mueller asked Gurry for his opinions on home registrations, to which he replied that WIPO did not want “change for change’s sake”. “We need to modernise the system,” he said.
Te General Court in Luxembourg was the next topic of discussion. Jean-Jo Evrard, a member of ECTA’s publications committee, lamented the “huge” number of appeals and “huge” backlog at the court. He said judgments were too long and too complicated to read—“you don’t need 100 paragraphs to assess the likelihood of confusion”.
Following Evrard’s comments, the audience heard about the allegations of leaks at
the Office of
Harmonization for the Internal Market (OHIM), based in Alicante, Spain. It has been claimed that confidential documents relating to some trademark applications became publicly available, raising fears that competitors could view private
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