As cinemas around Europe see James Bond fend off another contrived international threat, lawyers for the brand today are before the EU courts with a battle of their own on their hands, after rights to the ‘Dr No’ name fell into the wrong hands.
A small German media marketing firm based out of Munich (and not a bunker beneath some Pacific island volcano) won the right to use ‘Dr No’ as a brand from everything ranging from nautical instruments to vehicles, handbags, ‘whips, harness and saddlery’, clothing and drinks.
The company, Mission Productions, is understood however to be planning to licence the name to market products like cigarettes and energy drinks in Europe.
Mission Productions specialises in media and product placement in TV and film, and had done some high-profile placement work with the Bond people in the past.
Quite what happened to prompt Mission Productions to make an opportunistic trademark raid for ‘Dr No’ in 2001 is beyond BM.
But it turned out the German firm had done its homework: the name of the first, and arguably most famous Bond film, was still in the public domain, as in fact was most of the rest of the Bond canon.
The Bond production company Danjaq snapped up the European trademark rights for its 21 remaining film titles, but Dr.No was already in the clutches of Mission Productions.
It’s a true story.
No really.
(‘Monster returns to poring over the Court of First Instance timetable for trademark appeals of Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market Board of Appeal decisions, exhausted and bewildered by the brief moment of ‘something interesting’ that streaked through all too briefly like a whirlwind romance, only to leave one pining and deflated …
still, the take-home’s good …
and can’t complain about the pension and tax benefits …
Right. Next: “Action brought by the applicant for a figurative trade mark in the form an arch sloping to the right for goods in Class 18 for annulment of Decision R 786/2006-1 of the First Board of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) of 14 June 2007 annulling the decision of the Opposition Division rejecting the opposition of the proprietor of a national three-dimensional mark representing a shoe with a sloping arch, a number of national figurative marks in the form of various types of sloping arches and two figurative Community marks in the form of two types of arch for goods in Classes 18 and 25…
so lonely …)
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