Defensive trade mark registrations in Switzerland

I don't hold myself out as an expert on Swiss law (or Swiss anything, come to that), but a Supreme Court case on the (defensive) registration of GMAIL has come to my attention courtesy of an article on Mondaq, which you'll only be able to read if you're registered (free, and worth it, although it doesn't filter out the stuff you might be intersted as well as you might wish). The article comes from Froriep Renggli and is written by Laurent von Niederhäusern.

You can catch up wth the details yourself, if you care to do so, but suffice for our purposes to say that the way that trade mark registration systems all around the world are set up is intended to make defensive registrations impossible. The big surprise here is that it was the Supreme Court that had to say the registration will ill-conceived, the lower court having let it go because there hadn't been five years non-use. A clearer case of a bad-faith registration would be hard to imagine - although I do have one at the moment ...