TRADEMARK LAW
Incorrect automatic exclusion of marks consisting of the appearance of the packaging of the product itself that do not contain an inscription or a word element
• Instead of establishing whether the marks for which registration was sought varied significantly from the norm or customs of the sector, the General Court merely stated in a general manner, at para-graphs 79 and 78 of the judgments in T-109/08 and T-110/08 respectively, that since no bottle had been sold without a label or an equivalent, only that word element could determine the origin of the sparkling wine in question, so that the colour and matting of the glass of the bottle could not ‘function as a trade mark’ for sparkling wine for the relevant public when they were not used in combination with a word element.
IPPT20111020, CJEU, Freixenet v OHIM
