Waterfront partner, Matthew Harris, acting as advocate has secured a win in a contested hearing before the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office in a recent trade mark invalidity case. US company Andover Healthcare Inc had sought to invalidate the KO-FLEX trade mark of Urgo Limited for bandages by claiming prior rights in the term COFLEX under the law of passing off. The case was unusual in that the hearing officer had to consider the scope of Andover’s rights in the late 1990s and this required a consideration of the impact of the Medical Devices Regulations 1994 on market practice.
The decision was issued on 4 February 2015, but only now become publically available on the UK IPO website
Copyright litigation proceedings brought in London’s Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) against John Lewis, and its cartoon dragon ‘Excitable Edgar’, have been dismissed.
Superman is Clark Kent. Batman is Bruce Wayne. And Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, is…Dr Craig Wright (or so he claims).
As AI technology develops, we are now firmly in the age of non-humans authoring literary content which might be worthy of protection under intellectual property laws.
One of the hottest trade mark issues around at the moment is the question of how effectively can trade mark rights protect brand owners’ interests in non-fungible tokens (otherwise known as “NFTs”).