One of the benefits of the interaction promoted by organizations such as the International Trademark Association (INTA) is getting to know the most recent advances in the field across the interconnected business world. Today at the 133rd annual meeting in San Francisco (#INTASF), we had the opportunity of exploring the Intellectual Property Case Law from darts-ip, which has been in operation in Europe and is soon coming to the US market. This is a more thorough systematization of IP decisions than is presently available States-side and promises to significantly simplify and speed-up searches for all types of IP case law.
The darts-ip database
The current European-based offering offers a sophisticated search function into a database formed by painstakingly gathering local court opinions from 25 of the EU member states. A specialized legal team has analyzed every decision to record the most important legal information attributes, such as the specific points of law covered in the opinion, the characterization of product comparisons, asset classes, links to other decisions, as well as the normal bibliographic information one would expect in a database of legal cases, courts, dates, parties, and similar data.
With this tool, users can search decisions regarding a specific point of law, perhaps refining the search to cover a industry, or drilling down to decisions affecting a trademark of interest.
At #INTASF, we were able to do some demonstration searched on the new database covering US case law, which right now includes thousands of decisions from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), the US District courts, all the way through the Courts of Appeal to the Supreme Court. The database is still being fed with more and more decisions as they are codified, but already the searches allow for very fast searches for relevant case law for name marks, designs, patents, and domain names, cross-referencing the sequence of appeals, for example, and then easily showing the subsequent citation of each precedential decision, creating a complex virtual representation of the interconnections constantly being built by the practice of IP law and the preventive (opposition) and enforcement steps being taken every day.
We look forward to having the full availability of this service in the US.