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Chapter 20 - Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in Malta
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- By Paul Micallef Grimaud, Partner and head of the IP&TMT and Privacy practice groups at Ganado Advocates., Sarah Louise Azzopardi, Advocate at GANADO Advocates.
- Edited by Flip Petillion
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- Book:
- Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in the EU Member States
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 12 April 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2019, pp 813-858
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- Chapter
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
The protection of intellectual property rights has been identified as one of the key issues for the strengthening of the internal market in the European Union and case law relating to this subject is becoming increasingly prolific. This trend is prevalent throughout the European Union (“EU”) and Malta is no exception. In actual fact, a thorough legislative framework and proper application of intellectual property laws by the Maltese courts, has proven key to establishing Malta as a jurisdiction in which IP rights are held through Maltese holding companies.
By way of example, in the case of King.com Limited (C42504) vs. Avukat Dottor Louis Cassar Pullicino noe. (First Hall Civil Court, 18 April 2016) the Maltese Court, acting as the European Union Trade Mark Court, entered into uncharted territory in clarifying the interaction between Council Regulation No. 207/2009 on the Community trade mark (the “Regulation”), Directive 2004/48 of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (the “Enforcement Directive”) and national procedural laws in relation to the imposition of provisional, including protective measures. In particular, Article 103(1) of the aforementioned Regulation allows for European Union trade mark (“EUTM”) holders to apply for the same provisional, including protective measures available in a Member State in respect of a national trade mark.
In the fi rst instance, following the application by King.com Limited for the issuing of a warrant of prohibitory injunction to stop Team Lava LLC from using the “Candy” EUTMs (word marks and fi gurative marks), the Maltese Court was requested to decide whether or not to limit itself to the principles of Maltese procedural laws or whether there were additional principles, emanating from the Enforcement Directive, to be applied by the Court in determining whether there existed the requisite criteria for the imposition of the injunction.
The Court upheld the position advocated by the defendant and held that, when applying Article 103 of the Regulation, this being a provision of European law, utmost importance had to be paid to the Enforcement Directive's provisions since this was the proper instrument to be applied by the Court in giving effect to the measures found in the Regulation.
The role of light scatter in the residual visual sensitivity of patients with complete cerebral hemispherectomy
- Sheila M. King, Paul Azzopardi, Alan Cowey, John Oxbury, Susan Oxbury
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- Journal:
- Visual Neuroscience / Volume 13 / Issue 1 / January 1996
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 June 2009, pp. 1-13
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- Article
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Various residual visual capacities have been reported for the phenomenally blind field of hemispherectomized patients, providing evidence for the relative roles of cortical and subcortical pathways in vision. We attempted to characterize these functions by examining the ability of five patients to detect, localize, and discriminate high-contrast flashed, flickering and moving targets. Dependent measures were verbal, manual, and oculomotor responses. As a control for light scatter, intensity thresholds for monocular detection of targets in the hemianopic field were compared with thresholds obtained when using an additional half eyepatch to occlude the blind hemiretina of the tested eye. One unilaterally destriate patient was tested on the same tasks. In photopic conditions, none of the hemispherectomized patients could respond to visual cues in their impaired fields, whereas the destriate patient could detect, discriminate, and point to targets, and appreciate the apparent motion of stimuli across his midline. Under reduced lighting, the threshold luminance required by hemispherectomized patients to detect stimuli presented monocularly was similar to that required for their detection when all visual information was occluded in the blind field, and only available to the visual system indirectly via light scatter. In contrast, the destriate patient's monocular threshold in his blind field was substantially lower than that for stimuli directly occluded in the blind field. As we found no range of stimuli which the hemispherectomized patients could detect or discriminate that was not also associated with discriminable scattered light, we conclude that the subcortical pathways which survive hemispherectomy cannot mediate voluntary behavioural responses to visual information in the hemianopic field.