Who Should Own a Trademark: You or Your Company?
The ownership problem rarely appears while everybody agrees. It appears when a founder leaves, a company takes investment, a relationship breaks down, the business encounters financial difficulty or somebody wants to sell. At that point, discovering that the trademark belongs to the wrong person can become expensive. We have seen businesses invest considerable time and […]
Trademarks When Selling or Buying a Business
When somebody buys a business, they are rarely buying its equipment, website and customer list alone. They may be buying the name customers recognise, the reputation attached to it and the trust the business has built. That value sits in the brand, but a buyer needs to know that the seller owns it and has […]
Airbnb v bnb-side: How Far Can Trademark Rights Extend Over Descriptive Words?
A trademark can become enormously valuable as a business grows. A registered trademark is a business asset in its own right, capable of being sold, licensed or transferred, and its commercial value can increase significantly as recognition, reputation and goodwill develop around the brand. For some businesses, the trademark may eventually become one of the […]
Can a Trademark Be Split in Two? What a Dead GUINNESS Registration Shows About Brand Ownership
Search the UK register for GUINNESS and one of the results is dead. Two others are alive, carry the same filing date as the dead one, the same registration date, and belong to two different companies. That looks like a database problem. It isn’t. It’s a deliberate and fairly ordinary piece of trademark housekeeping, and […]
Can Someone Steal My Business Name?
Somebody registering your business name out from under you sounds like the kind of thing that happens to other people. It happens more often than you would think, and it very rarely involves anyone doing anything sneaky. Most of the time it is a business that liked the name, checked it was free on the […]
Proof of Use: What Is It, Why Does It Matter Where Trademarks Are Concerned and can ‘the blockchain’ help?
Unlike domain names, where many people over the years have made a living from buying attractive domain names and then reselling them at a premium when somebody wants them, trademarks have quite specific rules in place behind them to avoid what we refer to in the industry as trademark squatting. So, when you begin a […]
The Most Expensive Trademark Application Is the One That Fails
People ask me all the time what it costs to register a trademark in the UK. It is a fair question, and I understand why everyone wants a single number to plan around. But the honest answer is that the price of the application is rarely the price that matters. The cheapest filing is almost […]
It May Not be a Trademark that You Need!
When first meeting potential clients a common situation is whether what they need is a Trademark or a Patent. The two are similar in that they are both Intellectual Property (IP) but there are also other types of IP, such as Design’s and different types of trademarks that protect different things. When most businesses think […]
What is the Madrid Protocol, and does it work?
Thinking about international trademark registration? Learn the pros and cons of the Madrid Protocol and why local filing can offer better protection across global markets. This is one of those times when we can share our experiences with the hope of saving people money. If you are providing goods and services overseas, then you should […]
How The Right Trademark Representation Saves Businesses Money at Every Stage of Trademark Protection
Protecting a brand usually involves a few key stages: searching and research, registering through administrative services, monitoring for protection and enforcement, and where necessary dealing with oppositions and copycats. Traditionally, most of this work has been handled by IP solicitors and trademark attorneys. As many businesses discover, this often leads to unpredictable bills charged at […]