A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was an immediate success when it was first published selling 6,000 copies. Yet, as explored in an earlier post on copyright protection, Dickens made little money from it due to piracy. In ...

Intellectual property (IP) law will be relevant to every one of these businesses.  Yet MBA courses, books for start-ups, and entrepreneurship groups neglect IP law to a shocking extent.

Start-up publications and MBA courses ...

Images bring blog posts and articles alive. Downloading them from the Internet is just a matter of a few simple clicks. But are you infringing copyright if you use them? In the first of a two-part article on images, we look at ...

Content is important if you want to be found online. That’s well known. What is less understood is what the considerations are if someone asks to feature your content on their site.

With the proliferation of news aggregators,...

It is very common for people to be confused between different IP rights.  We often hear from individuals interested in “patenting” their brand, or “copyrighting” their invention, because there is a widespread lack of understan...

Nowadays many businesses are global from day one.

Even though you may just operate out of a bedroom in your home, when you sell online, you are potentially doing business in every country worldwide. That’s because the Intern...

The trouble with disregarding formalities, like legal agreements, is that even minor disagreements have the propensity to escalate into disputes.

An imperfect recollection of the terms of a contract is unlikely to escalate if th...

 Copying is so rife in business that if you have a profitable niche or concept, it would be surprising if competitors didn’t sooner or later try to capture some of your market share.

They will borrow freely from other businesse...

Although household name brands invariably have distinctive visual identities – for example, Coca-Cola’s bottle shape, and Nike’s swoosh – the primary sign through which any brand is identified is its name.

It is worth thinking ...

When choosing a new name, it can be confusing to know the order in which to do things – such as registering domain names, a company name, designing a new logo and so on.

People tend to do all these things and then only at the e...

Whilst the classification rules apply to the majority of trademarks, famous marks operate under slightly different rules. A famous mark has a much broader scope of protection than an ordinary mark. This is due to its widespread r...

If you have trademarked your brand name, it can be disconcerting to find that someone else beat you to it and registered it on a social media site.

A notable dispute on this question involved Instagram, where Kalamazoo Beer Exc...