Most people who start a business unknowingly neglect trademark issues when naming their business and products. Having developed the business concept and planned how they are going to sell their goods or services, most people these days then start to consider a domain name in order to have some sort of web presence. Finding an [...]

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Three years after a German court ruled that JOOP! could not register its ! on its own, the EU have handed down a decision which backs this up. Not that the fashion world were worried about not being able to use ! after every sentence!

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As more and more IP owners have discovered, protecting your name does not stop at a trade mark. As highlighted by the recent Facebook name grab, it is important that brand owners protect their right by registering their names as usernames on Facebook and other social networking sites. The cost to the brand if it [...]

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Google and LVMH are back in court this week over the use of trademarked terms in when used in adwords. Google’s current stance in the UK is that trademarked terms can be utilised as a search term to generate the display of competitors’ adverts, but cannot be used within the text of the advert itself. [...]

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We learn that the EU is going to change the price of its application and registration fees as this is the only way to ultimately reduce the surplus they currently enjoy. With the devaluation of sterling, this will probably bring them in £ terms to where they were a year ago! Watch this space.

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As of 1st October this year, the UK changed the rules relating to the amount of time a trade mark application will remain in the opposition period – this has been cut from 3 months to 2 months, which will mean that uncontested applications will go through that bit quicker. The time to respond has [...]

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An interesting extension of tag clouds available at the Many Eyes Information Project – here’s one of this blog

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The High Court has overturned the UK IPO’s previous decision to refuse to allow the names of shopping centres to be registered as trade marks in class 35. The Court relied upon the ECJ’s decision in Praktiker Bau- und Heimwerkermärkte AG [2005] ECR I-5873, which related to retail services, finding that there was no reason [...]

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Background In October 2007, the UK trade mark registry (UKIPO) changed the way in which they dealt with the citation of exact or similar marks, in relation to new applications. Before this date, if a new trade mark was applied for which was the same or similar to an existing mark and applied for in [...]

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