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On June 22, Chanel sued an American company selling buttons from the famous French luxury house, transformed into jewelry, for trademark counterfeiting and unfair competition. This practice, known as upcycling, seems to be an ideal solution in a world where demands for sustainability and environmentally-friendly measures continue to grow. Yet trademark owners are concerned about the practice. What is upcycling? What are the risks for consumers, but also for the companies marketing these upcycled products? Upcycling is the reuse of an existing product to make a new one that is more valuable, or at least designed to be more valuable. […]

Continuing the trend set in motion several years ago by the courts and appeal courts, the Paris Court of Appeal, in a ruling dated June 30, 2023, has taken yet another step in favor of companies on the subject of employee creations. In this case, the creations concerned are photographs. Let’s leave aside the question of the originality of photographic works and their eligibility for copyright protection, which is not always easy to demonstrate and therefore to obtain, and assume that the photographs in question are perfectly original. The case in question pitted an employee photographer against his employer, the […]

The American social network Twitter changed its name and logo on July 24th to adopt… the letter X : Its owner, Twitter Inc., has disappeared in favor of… X Corp , a subsidiary of the investment fund X Holding Corp, the whole process having started in 2022 with “Project X” (a loan contracted by businessman Elon MUSK to acquire Twitter). The circle is complete, and the surprise is in fact logical. Thus disappears an iconic global brand, Twitter, having generated a whole terminology, such as the terms tweeting or tweet, which have passed into everyday language (hardly replicable with “X”) […]

Infringement of the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) “Côtes du Rhône” and “Côtes du Rhône Villages“: Cancellation of the word and semi-figurative trademarks NEWRHONE evocative of the PDO. In 2018, SAS NEWRHONE MILLESIMES obtained registration of the NEWRHONE and trademarks with the INPI to identify “wines benefiting from the Protected Designations of Origin “Côtes du Rhône” and “Côtes du Rhône Villages” including Côtes du Rhône Crus, and other Protected Designations of Origin of the Rhône Valley” in class 33. The INAO (Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité) and the Syndicat général des vignerons réunis des côtes du Rhône […]