The Old Man and the SuitThe IPKat received this piece from his friend Miri Frankel. It appears that the estate of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway has commenced legal proceedings against bar owner Jeff Schleuning, who named his Greensboro (North Carolina, USA) premises Hemingway Downtown. Schleuning says he named the six-month-old business after an English bulldog he had as a boy. Says a lawyer for the estate:
"Regardless of who the establishment was named after, it really would not matter. The question is whether there is consumer confusion over the source of the name".Schleuning responds:
"We're actually the kind of bar he would despise coming to. From what I know of him, he liked little dive-type bars".The bar in dispute, located near a cluster of dance clubs and bars, targets an older, upper-class clientele who pay a membership fee to sip specialty martinis and smoke cigars.
Hemingway's famous titles include The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to ArmsThe IPKat wonders whether drinkers would associate the name Hemingway exclusively with Ernest and not with Mariel and Margaux, who both achieved a degree of celebrity in their own right.
Bad faith - in DutchThe IPKat congratulates Alexander Tsoutsanis on the successful defence of his doctoral thesis, 'Bad Faith Trade Mark Applications' (in Dutch, 'Het merkdepot te kwader trouw') earlier this month. The thesis reviews the law relating to bad faith in trade mark filing in of all the EU member states.
Dr Tsoutsanis, currently a member of the Department of Company Law & Intellectual Property Law at the incredibly beautiful and historical University of Leiden, joins prestigious Dutch IP boutique Klos Morel Vos & Schaap in January.
A Dutch edition of the thesis has been speedily published by Kluwer, containing a 12-page English summary. More to the point, this thesis is likely to be published in English early in 2007. If you'd like to be kept informed when the English version is ready, can you email Alexander and let him know.