S T R E T C H E D credibility

It is one thing to rip off a competitor.  But filing your own lookalike design in their home market surely stretches the bounds of credibility.  We are indebted to Dr Mark Schweitzer, of Meyer Lustenberger (sorry, "meyerlustenberger"!) and even more so to Mareike Hunfeld of Hogan Lovells, for drawing our attention to German Federal Court of Justice Decision of 22 April 2010, I ZR 89/08 (Stretched limousines).  Here is a link to the excellent Hogan Lovells newsletter report of the case.
By a spooky coincidence it features the S Class stretch limo, which we covered incidentally in our "leaks" posting last week.  However, that posting concerned the updated S Class.  The German case concerned infringement of the original S Class stretch limo registration, RCD 000173166-0007.  This was applied for in May 2004 under "deferred publication" to keep it secret until the 2005 launch.  It must therefore have surprised DaimlerChrysler to see that Centigon, a competitor for limos and armoured vehicles, had applied in January 2007 to register pretty much the same thing as German design 40700389.  Perhaps unsurprisingly they sued for infringement, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they succeeded.  The prior art cited included Daimler's own earlier models, but they overcame the kind of issues that sunk them in Sweden back in the day, and were upheld on validity. 
We have suggested several times recently that design infringement is on the up in the auto market, see here and here.  So far, the automakers seem to be winning these spats, where they have registered their designs.