June 21, 2010

By facilitating the dissemination of information to an extent far beyond any technology that has come before it, the Internet has enabled businesses to reach a global market more easily than ever before, given rise to the phenomenon...

June 28, 2010

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...

June 30, 2010

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...

July 2, 2010

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...

July 5, 2010

At the beginning of last week alleged Russian spies were charged in a US court. Are we going to see James Bond back with the femme fatales and the echoes of the cold war? Officially, US-Russian relations were remarkably warm this...

July 7, 2010

Last week nine websites that allowed people to download or stream TV programmes and films for free were closed down (see here), their domains seized by the US federal government. These sites included tvshack.net, Movies-Links.tv,...

July 15, 2010

Before considering what start ups require from their lawyers, it’s worth remembering that many businesses tend to change radically in the early years. A few years after starting up, they may look nothing like their initial...

July 19, 2010

In view of the controversy surrounding not only its contents, but the way in which it was passed, we had written on the recent Digital Economy Act in an earlier post. In this post I would like to focus not on the broader policy...

The popular social networking site Facebook, valued in the billions of dollars, is facing legal action brought by a plaintiff who claims to be entitled to the lion’s share of the business. The claim alleges that Paul Ceglia...

Over 90,000 American military documents relating to operations in Afghanistan have been leaked by the online whistleblower Wikileaks.

Read more about Wikileaks in our earlier post, and on their website.

These previously...

July 30, 2010

Since the release of the latest generation of consoles, the gaming industry has undergone considerable growth. No longer seen as a niche, antisocial pastime, the marketing strategies and innovative approaches to game design employed...

August 3, 2010

Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes comprise a wide range of techniques used to restrict the use of hardware, software and media – allowing publishers broad control over how the software is used by licensees. Game...