Community Designs and Earlier Trademark Rights: The Stabilo Highlighter Decision

摘要

In a conflict between an earlier trademark and a Community design registration, the General Court has clarified several points of law concerning trademark-based requests for invalidity of design registrations and annulled the decision of OHIM's Board of Appeal on the invalidity decision at issue, finding that OHIM had grounded its ruling on only one of the marks on which the request for invalidity was based.rnBeifa Group (hereinafter Beifa) obtained a Community design registration for a design for "instruments for writing". Schwan-Stabilo Schwanhauszer GmbH & Co. KG (hereinafter Stabilo) requested that Beifa's design registration be declared invalid. Its request was grounded on several trademarks, including Stabilo's earlier German trademark registration No 300454708 for, inter alia, "instruments for writing".