Posts under ‘trademarks’

ky has apparently been battling against Skype for the past 5 years over the ‘Sky’ part of their name. Sky claims that its rights in the ‘Sky’ name are infringed by Skype, and that people are confused into believing them to be part of the same company.

In their article earlier this year, the Ipkat drew attention to the fact that there is a marked separation between the worlds of trade marks and branding. More often than not the two are not addressed collectively, but are rather dealt with by completely separate teams, or even distinct organisations.  A creative team might deal [...]

In business, as in life, we are constantly assessing and managing risks.  One of the most important risks to avoid is that of choosing your brand name without doing some very careful searches.  I know this from personal experience. When I started up my law firm I named it A1 Law, having done a brief [...]

Should fan fiction be permitted by copyright law?  Roland Barthes, a literary theorist set out in his essay ‘Death of the Author’ his belief that once a text has been written by an author it no longer belongs to them, but to those who read it.  As he puts it: “to give a text an [...]

Some time ago Coca Cola registered COKE as a trade mark for soft drinks both in the UK and USA. So, I was interested to hear from my daughter that the term ‘coke’ is commonly used as a general reference to fizzy drinks throughout the southern parts of America. On looking into this it seems [...]

In the early days of the internet when the web was like a small village which has just  one bread shop, one toy shop or one other type of store, it was understandable that businesses were drawn to names like toys.com or books.com or hotels.com as business names not just as domain names.  But with [...]

So you may have made an online application to OHIM and you may be wondering why, after being informed by the EU registry (OHIM) that you’re trade mark has been published, you are still waiting for the certificate in the post. Don’t worry it’s not a postal strike, this time, that has delayed its arrival, [...]

When I wrote the introduction to my proposed new book in early November Why Web 2.0 Brand Protection Requires Online Brand Promotion, I hoped to publish this chapter shortly afterwards.

Fashionista-at-law reports the trade mark action brought against Crocs by Porsche over use of the name CAYMAN, which is one of Crocs’ best selling brands. The dispute arises because Porsche has a European Community Trade Mark for CAYMAN which among other things includes footwear as a classification.   The relevant descriptions are: Class 18: Leather and [...]

The troubles within the Freecycle network have resulted in over 40 per cent of the UK Freecycle groups breaking away to form an independent network called FREEGLE the Ecologist reported this week: The Ecologist Report. Unless it were successfully argued that FREEGLE is confusingly similar to the FREECYCLE brand – which is registered as a [...]