Our partners and attorneys are highly qualified and highly experienced to advise you in all areas of Intellectual Property law. We advise start-ups, SMEs, and multinational corporations and ensure that your inventions, brands and designs are expertly protected.
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In an appeal decision handed down on 26 January 2024 in Iconix Luxembourg Holdings Sarl v (1) Dream Pairs Europe Inc and (2) Top Glory Trading Group Inc [2024] EWCA Civ 29, the Court of Appeal has ruled that when considering post-sale confusion consideration should be given as to how trade marks or potentially infringing… Read more »
Originally designed and built to provide the US army with ‘High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicles’ (HMMWVs), it is believed that Arnold Schwarzenegger was instrumental in getting Hummers to the civilian market after they caught his attention when he was filming a movie. He was so taken with them that he approached the manufacturers and played… Read more »
As a firm, we have recently seen an increase in the number of entrepreneurs whose product listings on e-commerce platforms like Amazon or eBay have been removed due to takedown requests alleging intellectual property infringements. As specialists in intellectual property law, we are used to dealing with situations where the question of infringement is not… Read more »
The word “Metaverse” has been around for some time. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, but its wider adoption has been more recent. In 2022, 30 years since the term was first published, “Metaverse” came second-place in the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. It is fair to… Read more »
It is not a surprise that the UK IPO has seen an increase in the number of trade mark applications which attempt to protect goods and services offered in the Metaverse. In Tribunal Practice Notice 2/2023 (“TPN 2/23”), which was published in April 2023, the UK IPO issued guidance on the correct classification of non-fungible… Read more »
In September 2022, I considered some recent developments in the Iceland trade mark saga in this article. Following those developments, the Grand Board of Appeal of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (‘EUIPO’) has dismissed the appeals of Iceland Foods Limited (‘Iceland Foods’) and decided to invalidate its ICELAND trade marks. Background The British chain… Read more »
At the end of 2022 the EUIPO Board of Appeal annulled the 2019 decision to revoke McDonald’s BIG MAC mark and allowed the mark to remain on the register (Case R534/2019-4). Background to the case Supermac’s is a popular Irish chain of restaurants dating back to 1978. In 2017, Supermac’s Holdings Ltd (Supermac’s) filed two… Read more »
In one of the first legal cases to assess how trade mark law will apply to digital images protected by non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”), a New York jury has found that the MetaBirkin images produced by Mason Rothschild infringe the trade mark rights of Hermès in its Birkin bag. Artist Mason Rothschild created images of a… Read more »
The UK IPO has issued the first Tribunal Practice Notice (TPN) of 2023, which brings together previous guidance regarding costs in trade mark, patent and design tribunal proceedings and updates the scale of costs. Scale of costs The UK IPO Tribunal will continue to award costs in proceedings in line with the published scale. The… Read more »
As Trade Mark Attorneys, one of the questions we are asked on an almost daily basis is whether new marks are registrable. As UK IPO practice is forever evolving, it can be helpful to conduct regular reviews of the kinds of marks being refused by the UK IPO. In the latest instalment of our seasonal… Read more »
