PhD student Marija Markova (VU Faculty of Law, Private law department) will defend the dissertation „Effectiveness of Protection for Reputed Marks in the European Union“.
Doctoral dissertation researches whether the protection for trade marks with reputation in the EU is effective and applied uniformly in the Member States. In order to answer this question the research looks at the historical reasons which required granting trade mark proprietors rights beyond the principle of specialty at the international and EU level, discusses doctrinal theories justifying such an expanded protection and analyses historical roots of the concept “reputation”.
After concluding on the lack of concrete doctrinal grounds for the protection of marks with reputation, the thesis researches case law of the European Union Intellectual Property Office, Court of Justice of the European Union and the General Court. It is concluded that the application of provisions on reputed marks is in most cases successful if the protected junior mark has an extensive reputation within the general consuming public or the goods and services registered or used by both signs are similar in some way. Furthermore, the research reveals that case law of the CJEU is difficult to apply in practice due to introduction of the over burdensome concepts (such as “change in economic behaviour”).
The comparative part of the thesis researches the case law and practice of trade mark registries in the United Kingdom, Germany and Lithuania. This part of the dissertation reveals that national legal traditions and closely related fields of law (such as unfair competition rules) do have a strong effect on the practical applicability of EU rules on reputed marks at the national level. However, in spite of the differences, some communalities in applying the provisions emerge.
The research concludes that the protection of reputed marks should be redefined by affording it to marks known to the general consuming public and by limiting its scope.