The European Court of Justice ruled last week that cigarettes cannot be marketed with the terms MILD or LIGHT.  Japan Tobacco’s MILD SEVEN brand has a problem.  The ECJ decision seems to say “You can always pick another trademark.”

For those of you scoring at home, the Czech Budvar had a split decision in Hungary – it can use BUDWEISER but not BUD.

ICANN President Stuart Lynn’s interesting replies to comments on his proposal for new GTLDs.

The law of the place of the tort.  The allegedly libelous publication by Dow Jones was in Victoria, Australia.  The damage to reputation was in Victoria.  The law of the tort is the law of Victoria.  The text of the High Court of Australia decision is here.

A fraternity was involved in litigation in 1969 regarding use of its various indicia, and resolved the matter signing a consent agreement which bars it from asserting rights against, inter alia, “any jewelry or insignia goods manufacturer.”    Now the frat has a trademark dispute with a manufactuer, who was not involved in the 1969 dispute, but argues that it is protected by the language in the 1969 agreement.  Affirming a lower court rejection of that argument, the Eighth Circuit held that in general, consent agreements do not create rights in parties not bound by the agreement, and there was no extrinsic evience in this case that the drafters of the 1969 agreement had intended to create such rights here.  For the text of this decision, use Sigma Chi as a search term in the Eighth Circuit’s full text search engine.  Pure Country v. Sigma Chi, 02-1944 (8th Cir. Nov 27, 2002),

Google has apparently lost in the court of first instance in Norway regarding use of the domain name Google.no (.no being the Norwegian country code).  Via Greplaw.

Google should probably consider buying out the rights to Barney Google.

Low-cost branding strategies for the small business via Brandchannel.  One person’s definition of branding: 

“Branding is simply an integrated strategy of individual marketing techniques you can use to communicate to a targeted market about what your product or service can do for them. It’s an umbrella strategy that helps guide the rest of your marketing. . .”

The Trademark Blog has cracked the all-time top 100 list of Userland blogs.  In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.