Ferarri losing its trade mark over the 250 GTO and Amazon further supporting the fight against piracy

Good morning dear readers and welcome back to another weekly update on IP news.

Ferrari loses its trade mark over the 250 GTO

The 250 GTO, built between 1962 and 1964, is the firm's most iconic model, raced in period by the biggest names in motorsport. Although initially costing only around € 18.000, these cars are now considered as collector cars and have become one of the most expensive cars.

Now, Ferrari has lost its trade mark over the iconic 250 GTO because… it had not put the trade mark to genuine use for a continuous period of five years.

The trade mark was challenged by Ares Design, a custom coachbuilder based in Modena. After announcing in 2018 that Ares Design planned a limited run of “reinterpretation” 250 GTOs, Ferrari took the matters before the Bolognese court where the GTO was classified as a work of art, and Ares’ re-design as a copyright infringement.

Now, Ares Design fought back by stating before the EUIPO that the trade mark, held by Ferrari since 2008, had been filed in bad faith, as a defensive mark in order to block third parties to produce and sell similarly built sports cars. Ares Design argued that Ferrari had not put the design to use since 1964 and that, when they filed for the EU trademark in 2007, they had no intention to use it.

The EUIPO sided with the contestant and cancelled Ferrari’s trade mark (partially, because Ferrari still owns the shape when it comes to manufacturing car toys).

Amazon keeps fighting against piracy and counterfeits

After allying with Valentino, Amazon is now teaming up with publisher “Penguin Random House” and authors including Lee Child and John Grisham to go after pirate sites operating under the Kiss Library band. The A-Team has filed a complaint against several websites that claim to offer a premium selection of books at “unbeatable prices”. How can they do that? According to the plaintiffs, because they offered pirated eBooks.

According to the A-Team, Kiss Library and its websites are illegally copying, displaying, and distributing copyright-protected eBooks for their direct financial benefit, without proper authorisation.

The A-Team is seeking damages for each work infringed, for Kiss Library’s domain names to be disabled and to prevent any commercial entity to do business with them.  

This is all for this week’s news. You can expect a new blog post on Thursday regarding a recurring question from our Helpline.