The Supreme Court has today handed down its long awaited
judgment in Sky v SkyKick on the issue of bad
faith in trade mark filings. We are very proud that a Fieldfisher
team, led by John Linneker, represented SkyKick in the matter prior
to ConnectWise's acquisition of SkyKick earlier this year. Our
team included Christopher Leung, Natasha Rao, Samantha-Jayne
Millington and Mikhail Popov.
Sky had sued SkyKick for trade mark infringement and passing
off. The key consideration, which has led to the case escalating to
the Court of Justice of the European Union ("CJEU") and
the Supreme Court, was the extent to which Sky's trade marks
had been validly registered.
The position taken by SkyKick was that the great breadth of
Sky's trade marks indicated that the marks had been filed
solely for enforcement purposes and without a genuine intention to
use the marks in trade for all the goods and services covered. The
extent to which such a filing strategy is in bad faith, and
