![]() ![]() ![]() "The fact that you had all the justices voting unanimously shows that the court is trying to reel in abuses of intellectual property laws and bring them back to their original rationale, which is to ensure a fair marketplace," Mr. Kelly Gill, head of intellectual property litigation at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, said last week's Lego ruling sends a clear message that the Supreme Court is seeking to recalibrate a market imbalance that has allowed intellectual property rights to prevail over free competition. In recent years, however, legal experts warn that companies have been abusing IP laws with prolonged legal challenges that can scare off competition or saddle rivals with hefty legal costs. Patent, trademark and copyright laws were designed to temporarily grant exclusive rights typically for a limited time to protect and reward innovation or for the limited purpose of building brand awareness. the monopoly on bricks is over."īy their very nature, intellectual property or IP laws create monopolies. Justice Louis LeBel warned in a clear and eloquent decision, it "would amount to recreating a monopoly contrary to basic policies of the laws and legal principles which inform the various forms of intellectual property in our legal system. ![]() Had the court approved Lego's trademark challenge of Mega Bloks, Mr. The Supreme Court, in its first trademark ruling in a decade, disagreed. Lego's patent on the blocks had expired in 1988, but the Danish company has aggressively pushed to apply trademark protections by arguing that the raised studs on its interlocking toy bricks were part of its distinctive brand. Lego System AS for most of the past 50 years. The decision, delivered unanimously by all nine Supreme Court justices, found that Mega Bloks was free to sell plastic building blocks that look just like the ones that have been made exclusively by Denmark-based Intellectual property lawsuits have been potent anti-competition weapons for years, but the legal tactic lost some of its firepower in Canada last week when the Supreme Court dismissed a trademark infringement lawsuit by Lego Canada Inc. ![]()
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