The claimants had used the distinctive shape of their bottle to help advertise their soft drink. The registered design rights in the bottle had expired.
Held: The House refused to allow trade mark law to be exploited and rejected the argument that the manufacturer of a beverage sold under a trade name had established a perpetual monopoly in and could prevent the copying of the shape of a bottle which was no longer protected by the Registered Designs Act 1949. The House drew attention to the undesirable practice of seeking to expand the boundaries of intellectual property rights beyond the purposes for which they were created in order to obtain an unintended and undeserving monopoly.
[1986] 2 All ER 274, [1986] 1 WLR 695
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – In Re Smith Kline and French Laboratories Ltd HL 9-Feb-1989
The plaintiffs had applied for a product licence for a patented drug. To support its application, it supplied the authority with confidential information which the authority now sought to make use of the confidential information when considering . .
Cited – Interlego AG v Tyco Industries Inc PC 5-May-1988
How much new material for new copyright
(Hong Kong) Toy building bricks were manufactured by Lego in accordance with engineering drawings made for that purpose. One issue was whether new drawings made since 1972, altering the original drawings in various minor respects but added new . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 03 September 2021; Ref: scu.183214