Posts Tagged ‘trademarks’

When a key player in the Government’s plans to strengthen the IP framework, encourages business owners to file their own trade marks, explaining this is to help them afford trade mark registration, I wonder what’s going on. Many lawyers educate the public about the value of taking legal advice.  So, it is somewhat surprising for [...]

A key to differentiating a business is having an offering or a way of doing business that is unique to you, so you stand out from your competitors.  See my personal blog for differentiating a law firm Your differentiating proposition effectively says to consumers that buying from you will give them a specific benefit. This [...]

We have been keeping an eye on developments in the dispute over the APP STORE mark.  A new chapter in this interesting saga has begun. The challenge against Apple is bringing in more supporters and expanding to other jurisdictions. To recap, in our first blog we explained how Microsoft applied to the US Patent and [...]

As explained in this press release we saw a need to offer a ‘virtual trade mark registration’ service for law firms due to the SRA Conduct Rules 8 and 9 (which prohibit fee sharing with non lawyers and regulate referral fees). So, if a law firm’s clients need a trademark it is not straightforward for [...]

Last week Azrights announced the launch of its trademark registration white labelling solution for law firms.  It is the first comprehensive trademark white labelling service for UK law firms. UK Regulatory considerations The impetus behind it was the Solicitors’ Code of Conduct Rules 8 and 9 which prohibit fee sharing with non lawyers, and regulate [...]

A trade mark can be refused where it is descriptive of the goods and services it covers. This could be where the mark ‘designates the kind, quality, quantity, intended purpose, value or geographical origin’ of the goods or service or other characteristic. For example, ‘GOOD BOOKS’ would be a descriptive trade mark in a class [...]

Businesses are often surprised to learn that trademarks, unlike domain or company names, do not have to be the same to prevent others from using or registering them. Similar names are also covered. Some interesting examples of how trade mark protection may extend to similar names are Facebook, the Easy Group, and McDonalds.

ky has apparently been battling against Skype for the past 5 years over the ‘Sky’ part of their name. Sky claims that its rights in the ‘Sky’ name are infringed by Skype, and that people are confused into believing them to be part of the same company.

In their article earlier this year, the Ipkat drew attention to the fact that there is a marked separation between the worlds of trade marks and branding. More often than not the two are not addressed collectively, but are rather dealt with by completely separate teams, or even distinct organisations.  A creative team might deal [...]

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 hotels.com as business names not just as domain names.  But with [...]