Latest News
The Chinese Trade Mark Saga – Facebook Wins Trade Mark Case
While Apple Inc lost its trade mark case in China, Facebook has made headway by winning their trade mark case for its own brand name. A Chinese vegetable oil and potato chips maker called Zhongshan Pearl River registered ‘face book’ in 2014, but the courts in China...
Attention! Changes to Copyright Law Coming Into Practice from July 2016
Generally, a copyright protects musical, dramatic, literary and artistic works. Copyright protection is given to these types of works for a period of 70 years after the death of their creator. This rule comes with an exception! According to section 52 CDPA, the...
Registering your brand name
Registering a brand name can mean two different things. It can be either incorporating your company or registering your trade mark, which would be your brand. The latter is the more common understanding of the sentence ‘registering your brand’. How do you register...
Learning from Apple’s trade mark issues in China
Apple Inc, the tech giant, recently lost a court battle over the use of the word ‘iPhone’ on leather goods in China. A local company called Xintong Tiandi will continue to have the legal right to use ‘iPhone’ on leather goods. As expected, Apple wasn’t happy with the...
Unregistered and registered design rights
Good design lies at the heart of any good business. An excellent design transforms a product into a brand- think Coca-Cola’s distinctively curvaceous bottle or the iPhone’s iconic product design- so it’s important to protect the appearance of your product. The most...
How to deal with a trade mark infringement threat
Building a brand takes a lot of work.  After all the effort and hard labour you’ve put into creating your distinctive brand, it’s not pleasant to find out someone is using or manipulating the materials you’ve created. If you’ve registered a trade mark and someone is...
Protection under rules of ‘passing off’
It is often believed that the only way to effectively protect your company’s sign (name, slogan, logo, colour, shapes etc) is to obtain a trade mark registration. This might be true in most cases, but in others it is also or only possible to protect your sign through...
Why you should use a lawyer to file your trade mark registration
Filing a trade mark registration can be an expensive process, so it is unsurprising that many people question whether they should try to reduce costs by filing the application themselves, rather than employing a trade mark attorney. However, it is important to weigh...
Trade mark infringement on Google Adwords
Does the use of a trade mark in Google Adwords considered to be an infringement? What about the use of trade marks as keywords to trigger an ad on Adwords? Early last year, Samsung gained some positive coverage within the marketing industry for running the ad shown...
Changes To The EU Trade Mark Legislation
Attention business owners and entrepreneurs! As of March 23rd 2016, there’s a few changes being made to EU trade mark registration. If you’ve registered a trade mark in the EU or you were planning on doing so, you might need to take notice of a few changes....
