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....

September 8, 2008

Recently Nominet revealed that they were over 7 million registered .uk domain names. One million of those domain names were registered in the last year. In a recent survey of British internet users it was revealed that 72% of...

September 10, 2008

Joint copyright can be a dangerous trap for businesses. Disputes over joint copyright issues are often expensive, fact intensive and it is difficult to prove ownership. Several recent cases highlight problems that can...

September 19, 2008

Ubuntu is a well known free, open source based Linux based operating system. Their business model is to provide software free of charge but to make money by giving support instead. Recently there have been a large...

September 22, 2008

There is a popular myth that the best way to protect your copyright is to send a copy of the work to yourself in an envelope and that you will be protected so long as you do not open the envelope. Sadly, courts are not often...

October 3, 2008

In a surprise decision in the US, the makers of Splenda have lost their patent for sucralose which is the generic name for Splenda. This means that competitors can now sell the same sugar substitute. At the moment Splenda brings in...

October 7, 2008

An important decision for any brand owner, given the territorial nature of trade marks, is in which countries to seek protection.

Many applicants may only trade in their home country, but for others based in the European Union, it...