NIPC Law

Supreme Court of the United Kingdom P hoto Pam Fray Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence. Source Wikipedia In  Reckitt & Colman Products Ltd v Borden Inc   [1990] 1 WLR 491, [1990] RPC 341, [1990] WLR 491, [1990] 1 All ER 873, [1990] UKHL 12, Lord Oliver said: "The law of passing off can be summarised in one short general proposition - no man may pass off his goods as those of another. More specifically, it may be expressed in terms of the elements which the plaintiff in such an action has to prove in order to succeed. These are three in number. First, he must establish a goodwill or reputation attached to the goods or services which he supplies in the mind of the purchasing public by association with the identifying "get-up" (whether it consists simply of a brand name or a trade description, or the individual features of labelling or packaging) under which his particular goods or services are...

In Starbucks (HK) Ltd and Others v British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc and Others [2012] EWHC 3074 (Ch) (2 Nov 2012) a group of Hong Kong-based broadcasting, media and telecommunications companies headed by PCCW Ltd. ( "PCCW" ) sued the well-known group of broadcasting and telecommunications companies that operate under the Sky sign   for infringement of Starbruck (HK) Ltd's Community trade mark number 4504891 and passing off. The CTM was as follows: It was registered for a variety of goods and services in classes 9, 35, 38, 41 and 42, including "telecommunication services; … telecommunication of information (web pages), computer programs and data; … radio and television communication services; … television broadcasting services; broadcasting and transmission of radio and television programmes; cable television broadcasting; … transmission of music, films, interactive programmes, videos, electronic computer games". The proceedings we...