The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by a company that sold range cookers against a ruling that it had infringed AGA Rangemaster’s trade marks.
The company’s range cookers were fitted with an electric control system, which could also be fitted to AGA cookers to convert them from running on fossil fuels to running on electricity. AGA Rangemaster objected to the company’s sale of retrofitted AGA cookers with the control system. It brought claims of trade mark and copyright infringement.
The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) found that the way the company marketed and sold the converted AGA cookers – including the use of the phrase ‘Buy an eControl AGA’ on its website – created the impression that there was a commercial connection between the company’s products and AGA Rangemaster. As such, AGA Rangemaster had a legitimate reason to oppose further dealing in the cookers under Section 12(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1994. The IPEC concluded that the company’s activities were detrimental to and took unfair advantage of the distinctive character of AGA Rangemaster’s trade marks, and that they constituted trade mark infringements.
AGA Rangemaster’s claim of copyright infringement, relating to a CAD drawing showing the design of its cookers’ control panels, was rejected. The drawing was a design document for something that was not an artistic work, and it was therefore not an infringement of copyright for the company to make control panels to the design, by virtue of Section 51 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The company appealed the IPEC’s ruling on trade mark infringement to the Court of Appeal. AGA Rangemaster cross-appealed against the decision on copyright infringement.
The Court rejected the company’s arguments that the IPEC had applied the wrong legal test for whether there were legitimate grounds to oppose further dealing in the cookers. It had simply concluded that the company’s statements were likely to give customers the impression that they were being offered an AGA product. While it would have been an error of law to find that customers would have difficulty telling that the product was not an AGA product, that was not what had happened. The IPEC had not erred in identifying a connection between the products rather than simply between the company and AGA Rangemaster. Nor had it wrongly carried out a balancing exercise between AGA Rangemaster’s interests and the interests of the company as a dealer of AGA cookers in the aftermarket.
The IPEC’s conclusion about what impression customers were likely to be given by the company’s material was not rationally unsupportable: it had considered the material, come to a conclusion which was open to it on the evidence and given cogent reasons for that conclusion. The company’s appeal was dismissed.
AGA Rangemaster’s cross-appeal was also dismissed. The control panel was primarily a functional object, although it incorporated artistic elements and in particular graphic elements. The IPEC had been correct to decide that it was not an artistic work.
