May 18, 2010

 A controversial subject for some, copyright infringement has become a more common conversation topic as peer-to-peer networks, and widespread high speed broadband, have made it easy for members of the public to find, download, and shar...

May 21, 2010

In the early days of the internet when the web was like a small village which has just  one bread shop, one toy shop or one other type of store, it was understandable that businesses were drawn to names like toys.com or books.com or hot...

June 2, 2010

Recent online campaigns by Facebook users, such as ‘Quit Facebook Day’ illustrates the uneasiness and increasing lack of trust of Facebook as a custodian of people’s private lives. At the end of April this year four US senators sent a c...

June 14, 2010

Last week I suggested questions to ask your business lawyer.  But let’s accept it – legal isn’t as much fun as working in your business, or marketing it.  Legal stuff just isn’t sexy.

 So, if like millions of other entrepreneurs, you ...

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 of...

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 throughout the ...

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 them, but to those who ...

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 personal experience.

W...

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 spring...

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, FilesP...

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 manifestatio...

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 conside...