Can You Sue Someone for Copying Your Brand? What Louboutin v YSL Actually Decided
Someone has copied part of your brand. Can you sue them? Usually yes, if you hold a registered trademark covering what they’ve taken. But holding one doesn’t mean you win, and it doesn’t mean the copy has to stop. A registration gives you standing to act and a much faster route to acting. It does […]
The Trademark Helpline launches enhanced client monitoring, portal access and new business-support services
Please take a moment to read this news carefully as there is something at the end worth knowing about Over the coming weeks, you are going to start seeing a lot more from The Trademark Helpline. Not necessarily because we are doing more (although we are investing heavily in improving our services), but because we […]
Why Is OpenAI’s ChatGPT Trademark Being Opposed in Australia?
OpenAI’s ChatGPT trademark has been opposed in Australia by the owner of the GPT property group. How oppositions work there and what it means for UK brands.
Scam Warning: St Nic’s Legal Services, Have You Received a “Legal Notice on Business Name and Domain Rights Conflict”?
One of our clients has received another concerning trademark warning email. This time it came from an organisation calling itself St Nic’s Legal Services, using the domain stnicslegalservices.co.uk. The email was headed “Legal Notice on Business Name and Domain Rights Conflict”. It claimed that an unnamed party was preparing to file a UK trademark application […]
Supermac’s Beat McDonald’s at the UK Registry. Here’s What That Says About Names That Look Too Similar
Most people worry about someone copying their name. Far fewer worry about the opposite, that their own name might be a bit too close to somebody else’s, and that the somebody else might be very large indeed. It’s one of the more uncomfortable questions I get asked, usually quietly, near the end of a call. […]
Jersey Just Dropped Out of UK International Trademark Registrations: It’s a Small Change That Makes a Bigger Point
On 1 August, Jersey quietly stopped being covered by the United Kingdom designation of an international trademark registration. If that sentence means nothing to you, that is genuinely fine, and it may well mean you have avoided the problem it describes. But it is worth two minutes of your time, because the change is a […]
Scam Warning: Trademarkium, Have You Received a “UK Registration Documentation” Email?
We were recently notified of a trademark warning email doing the rounds, which was brought to our attention by a very astute Superintendent Minister of a London based Methodist church, who suspected something was amiss due to the opening language of the email and the poor formatting of the image based signature. The email came […]
Scam Warning: MA & Co Law, Have You Received a “Legal Notice on Business Name and Domain Rights Conflict”?
One of our clients has received another trademark warning email. This one is slightly different because there appears to be a genuine regulated firm called MA & Co Law Ltd. That does not mean the email is genuine. In fact, that is exactly why this type of correspondence can be so dangerous. A business owner […]
Trademark Decisions Are Business Risk Decisions: Lessons from 4,176 UK Registrations
A PR agency recently asked our founder, Jonathan Paton, a deceptively simple question: after all this time in trademarks, what is the one thing that stands out? His answer, after seventeen years and 4,176 UK trademark registrations, was not about case law or filing tactics. It was this: the commercial decision outweighs the legal one […]
First to File vs First to Use: The Question Every Brand Owner Should Ask After Anthropic v Abnormal AI
There is a big difference between owning a brand name in your head and owning it on the trademark register. The dispute between Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and Abnormal AI is a live, real world example of what that difference can cost, and it answers a question we hear from business owners every week: […]
