Posts Tagged ‘trade marks’

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 [...]

Last week I suggested questions to ask your business lawyer.  But let’s accept it – legal isn’t as much fun as working in your business, or marketing it.  Legal stuff just isn’t sexy. So, if like millions of other entrepreneurs, you are tempted to ignore the legal stuff, or to write it off as a [...]

World Intellectual Property Day is an annual occasion held on the 26th of April, the anniversary marking the date on which the Convention establishing the Word Intellectual Property Organisation came into force in 1970. The objective of the day is fourfold: to spread awareness of the relevance of intellectual property (IP); to demonstrate the way [...]

Have you ever seen cheap imitation perfumes on sale at market stalls or on the internet?  The ones that tend to look similar in their packaging or bottling to other up-market products? Well according to a recent decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) their manufacturers are in breach of trade mark law. Under [...]

It is obviously easier and cheaper to prevent cybersquatting and name squatting by pre-emptively protecting your brand and blocking your trade marks from being used by others. For those who have missed the chance to register their business names with Facebook (see earlier post) the solution is to set up a Page and then register [...]

Phenomenal publicity was generated by the Facebook user name policy change last week.  There was a flurry of tweets about it on Twitter, and many lawyers raced to advise their clients of the importance of registering their trademarks at Facebook (at least in the sense of notifying Facebook of their registered rights so as to [...]

Web projects are riddled with Intellectual Property Rights issues.  These have a long term impact on the future of the business.  Awareness of online branding, search engines, copyright law and the technicalities involved in specifying a web presence are some of the key issues to consider. An unregulated web means anyone can and does set [...]

Now that the High Court in Interflora v Marks & Spencer has suggested a referral to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the question of trade mark infringement for using of competitors’ keywords in adwords campaigns, (reported by the Ipkat ) it takes to seven the number of referrals to the ECJ on this [...]

The incident involving Community Trade Mark Filing Service and defamation threats has been thought provoking on many levels. Only recently I wrote an article on online reputation monitoring for the Society of Computers and Law magazine.  (The article is accessible to members, and at £50 per annum, membership is excellent value). In the article I [...]

I think it’s worth looking at what has happened here given the allegations of defamation. It all started when I posted a tweet on Twitter mentioning that 3 clients had received CTMFS’ ‘invoices’. Ending with the word ‘scams’. If Mr Evans’ intention was to stop the use of the word ‘scam’ in relation to the [...]