Curia replies to Sir Kat -- and it's good news!

Yesterday the IPKat carried on his campaign for the Curia website to fix the defective images of Community trade marks and signs that are supposed to be shown embedded in the judgments of the Court of First Instance of the European Communities in Community trade mark appeals (see earlier posts here and here). The IPKat has now received an emailed response, and it's a welcome one:

"Importance: High [Quite right! That's one thing that the IPKat and Curia agree on]

Dear Sir [The Court of Justice is a great stickler for protocol and correct etiquette. If its officials address a fictional Kat as "Sir", you can be sure that it's the proper mode of address ...],

To answer your mail from October 22, we corrected the image from case T-307/08. The access to the images should be all right now. [It is all right. The Kat has checked it out personally. The images in this decision are both reproduced on this post]

Yours sincerely,

Georgios Kamolinos
Cour de Justice des C.E."

The IPKat has already written to Georgios to thank him and to ask him a couple more things:

"1. It has been noted that images have been found to be inaccessible in many other judgments. We are all grateful that they have been instated for Case T-307/08. Can we now assume that they will be made to appear in all future CFI decisions and that the deficient images in the old judgments will be corrected?

2. Would it be possibly to place hyperlinks from the CFI decisions on Community trade marks and Registered Community Designs to the decisions of the Boards of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market from which the appeals or applications to the CFI have been made?".

As ever, the Kat waits expectantly for the positive answer he so fervently desires. If Curia says it doesn't have the money to carry on this important work, the IPKat knows exactly who does ... [If you really don't know, click here to find out].

Do you get the picture?

Today's ruling in Case T-307/08 Aldi Einkauf v OHIM - Goya Importaciones y Distribuciones (4 OUT Living) is a decision of the Court of First Instance of the European Communities on an appeal by Aldi against a partially successful opposition lodged by Goya against its application to register a figurative sign, "4 OUT Living", in the face of a likelihood of confusion with an earlier Spanish figurative mark "Living & Co".

If you click here you can read the judgment in full, and you get the impression that both figurative marks are reproduced. However, the IPKat finds annoyingly that he quite often gets the "image not found" text and icon (as happened to him here), which means he has no means of comparing the marks.

This causes the Kat to wonder -- since he has achieved the same depressing result over the years on several different computers and when using different browsers -- whether the problem is confined to him or whether there are hordes of people out there who have the same difficulty in comparing figurative marks on the Curia site. Accordingly he's holding a swift micro-poll (see left-hand sidebar) to try to gauge how many visitors to the Curia site can actually see the images. If enough of us can't view the images, it may be time to make some discreet representations to the court.