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 the...

Japan and the United States both filed their official instruments at the WIPO headquarters in February 2015 in order to join the Hague System.

This increases the number of Hague signatories to 64 nations.

The Hague System allows...

The proposed creation of one body of copyright law for the Digital Single Market meets with numerous objections from the film industry.

Brussels has proposed the creation of an integrated body of copyright law that would...

 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...

Financial institutions run competitions for startups to foster technological innovation.

Recently, prominent financial institutions have begun looking to alternative sources for innovative technologies. Three major players in the...

I was surprised to learn recently that it is no longer possible to find out what keywords searchers type into Google in order to find their way to your website.

This is valuable information for website owners and the reason why...

Two days ago in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak joined the ever growing list of science and technology billionaires who are concerned about the development of artificial...

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....

On 27 Friday 2015, Aston Martin filed suit against Galpin, in the Central District of California on the grounds that Galpin’s new prototype design for the Thunderbolt infringed their intellectual property rights....

While it is not possible to register “international trademarks”, the Madrid Protocol system provides the next best solution if the country in which you want to register has signed up to the Madrid Protocol.

The current...

At the end of March the EPO issued two decisions in the highly publicised Tomato II and Broccoli II cases. Both of these cases involved seeds for plants that were grown conventionally or through...

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...