Elzaburu named honorary partner

Elzaburu has named, Antonio Castán, honorary partner. After his retired the firm has taken this decision so that he can at least maintain a testimonial or symbolic link.

After 37 years of professional practice, the last 25 as a partner of the firm, Antonio Castán has been forced to retire due to an irreversible eye problem. As he himself says, “there was no question of turning me into the Stevie Wonder of Industrial and Intellectual Property, and I like his music!

The Board of Professional Members has agreed to make him an Honorary Member of Elzaburu, so that he can at least maintain a testimonial or symbolic link with all the colleagues and friends whom he appreciates so much and with whom he has shared so many years in the profession.

Antonio is a lawyer from the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas (ICADE) and has been a member of the Bar since 1985. He has been a lecturer at this university and at the Magister Lucentinus of the University of Alicante. He is the author of numerous publications and books, such as “El plagio y otros estudios de propiedad intelectual“, “Propiedad Intelectual y también, Poesía” and “Las patentes en el ecosistema digital y otros estudios sobre propiedad industrial“, among others.

His professional career has been focused on industrial and intellectual property litigation, defending in trials such endearing characters as Tarzan, Lex Luthor or The Simpsons, but also writers such as Chesterton or celebrities such as Zinedine Zidane.

He obtained for Jack Daniel’s the first judgment of the Spanish Supreme Court on Community exhaustion of trade mark rights in a case of parallel imports and secured in Spain the position of the American beer brand Budweiser against the czech company in the well-known international dispute. In a pharmaceutical patent infringement case for french laboratories, preliminary proceedings and court action led to an $8 million damages award.

In the year of his retirement, Antonio Castán had the satisfaction of receiving two pieces of good news: the ruling of the Supreme Court confirming the dismissal of a civil action brought against UNIR (International University of La Rioja), the leading international university in on-line education, which sought the cessation of the use of the name because the Court of Justice had refused to register this trademark in the European Union; and the dismissal of a lawsuit for plagiarism of television formats against the popular TVE series “Un país para escuchararlo” (A country to listen to it).

Julia Gil

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