April 25, 2008

As reported a couple of days ago by Outlaw.com, HMRC have in recent years been criticised like many other bodies for their failures in complying with the Data Protection Act 1998 by the Information...

April 28, 2008

Trade mark law is never black and white.When it comes to registering a mark, there are often surprises once the application is examined by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).

For example, Jeremy Phillips recently ...

May 6, 2008

An established trader in USA has been selling pickled goods under the name McSweet for a number of years. However, as soon as he filed an application for a trade mark at the USPTO McDonald’s opposed the registration on the...

May 14, 2008

In recent years, a number of comparative websites have appeared online in which consumers can compare prices of a number of businesses without the need to search individual websites.

Websites such as Expedia use special web...

May 29, 2008

My recent trip to INTA was interesting on many grounds, which I hope to report on over the next few weeks, particularly as regards the insights I gained into why anyone having products manufactured in China needs to register a...

August 14, 2008

Japan has joined a handful of other jurisdictions which recognise the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle as trade mark. According to the New York Times (see here), Coca-Cola had been pushing for this mark since 2003. They have...

August 14, 2008

In 2005 the book Word Freak and the subsequent documentary Word Wars showcased the zeal of Scrabble players. Scrabble aficionados joined the virtual world in 2006 when the Scrabulous application was added to Facebook. The...

August 28, 2008

Scottish Whisky was given legal protection in China last week when the Scottish Whisky Association made a deal with the Chinese government to register a collective trade mark which acts as a geographical indicator. The protection...

September 1, 2008

Microsoft recently made the statement that they consider any unlicensed use of their software to be an act of piracy regardless of whether the use is intentional or not. Traditionally piracy is defined as illegally copied or...

September 3, 2008

It has recently emerged that the USPTO (the US trade mark registry) has denied Dell a trade mark for the phrase CLOUD COMPUTING SOLUTIONS on the ground that it is generic and used to describe a wide variety of computing activity....