Month: February 2016
The EU Referendum: what it means for trade marks
As June’s EU Referendum is everywhere, I thought it would be useful to take a look at one of the great benefits that UK businesses have as a result of their membership of the EU, namely the Community Trade Mark (“CTM”).
A CTM provides protection across all member states of the European Union in a single registration. CTMs are dealt with by a Registry located in Alicante, Spain. The CTM system is phenomenally successful, and saw around 105,000 applications filed only last year.
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Why your trade mark could be worthless and what you need to do about it
One of the biggest tasks involved in filing a trade mark application is correctly drafting the list of goods and services, namely the “specification”.
Now this may sound simple, but this part of the process is critical.
The fact is that there are many different ways in which a poorly drafted specification can have a negative impact on the worth of your trade mark. We look at two of them below.
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Do trade marks stifle innovation?
IP rights designed to motivate the creation of new innovative products by awarding a monopoly, are increasingly criticized for having the opposite effect of that intended. This article seeks to show that trade marks are still valuable in the post-Internet age.
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Business owners: act fast before March’s CTM fee increase
In 1996 the Community Trade Mark came into being, providing business owners with a trade mark which covered the entire European Union with one single application.
It was nothing short of revolutionary, and I remember it well.
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