Amendment to the Slovenian Industrial Property Act (ZIL-1E)
On 16 March 2020, the new amendment to the Slovenian Industrial Property Act (ZIL-1E) was published in the Official Gazzete. ZIL-1E will enter into force on Sunday, 29 March 2020.
The amendment implements into Slovenian legislation the EU Directive 2015/2436 to approximate the laws of the Member States relating to trade marks. Consequently, the amendment brings the Slovenian trademark legislation considerably closer to the regulation of EU trademarks.
Most notable changes, introduced by the ZIL-1E amendment, are as follows:
– the definition of trademark no longer requires the mark to be graphically represented. Instead, it is enough that the mark is represented in any appropriate form using generally available technology (this implicitly introduces sound marks, movement marks, multimedia marks, even holographic marks …);
– absolute grounds for refusal of registration are revised, as they no longer contain grounds not included in the Directive …, whereas additional grounds, such as opposition to traditional terms for wines, opposition to traditional specialties guaranteed etc. are added;
– relative grounds for refusal of registration now contain more detailed descriptions;
– registration procedure will now closely resemble that of the EU trademarks. Parties will now be able to settle during the pposition procedure and the opponent to the registration will need to prove prior use of their trademark, should the applicant so require.
In addition, the new amendment ZIL-1E also introduces provisions that will facilitate the Slovenian Intellectual Property Office’s (SIPO) transition to electronic conduct of business.
On September 16, 2023, Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič participated in the event @Re:Source MAH – the 10th International Conference on Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology. The program was divided into various categories (“tracks”), specifically focusing on the documentation and preservation of media arts; climate change; pioneers of media arts; and the history of media arts in museums.
The U.S. Copyright Office has once again denied the registration of an artwork created by artificial intelligence. Artist Jason M. Allen was unsuccessful in his second attempt to register the artwork “Theatre D’opera Spatial” as a copyrighted work because it contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
On Friday 23 June 2023, a webinar entitled “Copyright and Legal Basis for Generative Artificial Intelligence Training” was held as the inaugural event of an informal research network in the region in the field of copyright. Researchers from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and North Macedonia participated in the event, which is part of the national Open Knowledge Day initiative and the national and regional coordination activities carried out by ODIPI under the auspices of Knowledge Rights 21.
The new report of the Knowledge Rights 21 project partner SPARC Europe is now available.