Posts under ‘infringement’

In this post I’m going to offer some information that I think might be quite useful to you when you’re establishing a new business or product. You’re likely to be thinking about a name, commissioning a website and logo to launch it, and considering how you will market it and so on. Relatively few people [...]

Of all the IP laws, copyright is the most wide-ranging in scope and application.      However, there is confusion as to whether copyright protects underlying ideas.  Does it protect ideas incorporated in a piece of writing, or a film or CD? Many people assume copyright does prevent the copying of ideas.  However, copyright in written materials [...]

Copyright offers crucial protection to individuals and businesses alike enabling them to own and exploit their creative works.  This might include photographs, articles, software, website designs, films, music and a range of other forms of creative expression.  Copyright law allows authors to claim compensation when their work is copied without authorisation, but a critical issue [...]

Intellectual property is the cornerstone of many modern businesses, and the law offers various mechanisms to safeguard know how, creativity, ingenuity and investment in reputation and marketing.  A significant complexity when it comes to securing rights is deciding which means of protection is/are appropriate.  An important factor in such a decision is the nature of [...]

The Pirate Bay has been thrown into the limelight a number of times, not least following a legal battle over copyright infringement which resulted in jail sentences for the four site operators in April 2009 (though at the time of writing, the website is still operational).  Recently two of its founders announced their decision to [...]

Further progress was made in the Newzbin saga last week when the High Court ordered BT to prevent its subscribers from accessing the website.  You may recall that the site had hopped abroad to the Seychelles, escaping the reach of the UK courts (or so it thought).  However, despite its emigration, the Motion Picture Association [...]

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court recently rendered its decision in the first Intellectual Property case heard since it opened for business in October 2009.  The case, Lucasfilm v Ainsworth, concerned infringement of copyright subsisting in Stormtrooper helmets, which had in the past been produced by Andrew Ainsworth for the Star Wars films. Under ss.51 and [...]

Back in 2009 eBay won a court case against L’Oreal over the sale of counterfeit goods on its website. The High Court in the UK ruled that the online marketplace, eBay, was not responsible for fake goods being sold on its website, but that it should do more to help prevent any trademark infringement.   The case was [...]

We have written previously on copyright holders’ efforts to effect the removal of sites linking to or hosting infringing content, and also on new measures being introduced by the Digital Economy Act, which provide for injunctive relief where a website “has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with [...]

The internet revolutionised the way people could discover and share information, but as technology has developed, the volume of information which can be shared online, and the variety of its application have broadened significantly.  When the bandwidth available to typical internet users was sufficient, there was an explosion in online sharing of music through services [...]