Furniture Village brought a Nominet complaint about furnitureland.co.uk. The respondent claimed that, although he knew about Furnitureland, he thought they had stopped trading, and so his registration of the domain name was in good faith.

Both the first instance Expert and Appeal Panel agreed, so the respondent gets to keep the domain furnitureland.co.uk, which it is using as a click through website.

The case shows that the Nominet DRS is not suitable unless the complainant can clearly show the registrant knew of the complainant’s rights.

Faced with similar facts, brand owners should consider a passing off or trade mark action, which may have a better chance of succeeding.

It is also worth noting that the panel maintained the DRS’s reputation for speed by refusing to stay the appeal because of a pending trade mark revocation.

Posted by Giles Parsons, who specialises in intellectual property agreements and disputes relating to patents, copyright, trade marks, designs, as well as domain name disputes and reputation management.

Giles Parsons
0121 237 4557
gparsons@brownejacobson.com

HTC will by 19 April 2012 remove from all their devices the infringing feature, which enables the user to convert embedded data (such as a phone number) into a hyperlink.

The ITC embarked on their initial investigation in April 2010 after Apple complained that HTC infringed ten patents, which could have led to a ban of all HTC devices in the US market. Apple later dropped six patents and an ITC judge ruled that HTC had infringed two of the remaining four patents. This overdue final ITC decision, which follows a request for a review of their previous ruling from both companies, has been welcomed by the Taiwanese mobile phone-maker.

This result will be of interest to those following the patent disputes that Apple are embroiled in relating to Android technology, most notably with South Korean rival Samsung.

Laura Mackenzie
0121 237 3959
lmackenzie@brownejacobson.com

Their interpretation was that someone can infringe simply by supplying “means essential” for using a patented invention if, when supplying, they know (or it is obvious to a reasonable person in the circumstances), that ultimate users will intend to put the invention into effect.

The decision was underlined this week in KCI Licensing v Smith & Nephew. The original judge had found that on the facts it would have been obvious that end users of Smith & Nephew’s wound drainage device might combine it with a clamp, infringing KCI’s patent. The Court of Appeal therefore held that by supplying the device, Smith & Nephew had themselves infringed.

This interpretation of the statute is likely to catch many more ‘indirect’ infringers – companies should be particularly careful when advertising products that they don’t suggest potentially infringing modifications.

Laura Phillips
0115 976 6182
lphillips@brownejacobson.com

European Directive 98/44 EC explicitly said that biotech patents can be granted, although certain things including plant or animal varieties or the discovery of human genes were not patentable. However, the specific drafting of a claim is a different matter, and Venter’s patent’s claims were originally very broad.

Venter’s patent application is being examined by the EPO. Objections to the initial application were made by the examiner in April 2009, which the examiner said were “such that there is no possibility of overcoming them by amendment”. A reply was filed in February 2010, reducing the claims from 28 to 20, and having spent a reported $40 million to create the synthetic DNA, there is no doubt that Synthetic Genomics, the company in whose name the patent was filed, will fight hard to get all the patent protection it can get. It will be interesting to see whether any patents they end up with in Europe do protect anything of monetary worth.

Posted by Giles Parsons
0121 237 4557
gparsons@brownejacobson.com