Blog & News

Irishman Conor McGregor’s trade mark battles to secure registration of name and nickname – “The Notorious”

Conor McGregor’s trade mark battles This ‘notorious’ Irishman is the reigning UFC Lightweight Champion and former UFC Featherweight Champion. His most recent battles are in the trade marks arena where…

New “Swissness” legislation, roll on “Britishness”!

New “Swissness” legislation, roll on “Britishness”! On 1 January 2017 the new “Swissness” legislation came into force in Switzerland. The purpose of this new legislation is to ensure the continued…

BriffaBites – Spring Cleaning your Intellectual Property Portfolio

#BriffaBites – Spring Cleaning your Intellectual Property Portfolio For many businesses, they register their domain names and trade marks, put the certificates at the back of a drawer and forget…

BriffaBites – Star Trek

#BriffaBites – Star Trek As an avid trekkie, the latest on the copyright infringement brought by CBS and Paramount against Axanar is riveting. Published at a time when CBS and…

Indemnity Costs in the IPEC

Indemnity Costs in the IPEC One of the great successes of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (the “IPEC”, formerly known as the Patents County Court) is the recognition that not…

BriffaWay – Kindness

#BriffaWay – Kindness More than 2000 years after some poor bloke was nailed to a tree for suggesting that people should just be nice to one another, the kindness movement…

A Christmas present from Briffa – 5 top tips for the perfect brand name

A Christmas present from Briffa – 5 top tips for the perfect brand name. Choosing the ideal brand name is no mean feat. For it to be truly valuable to…

Duran Duran Sued by Publisher for Reclaiming Song Rights

Photograph by Jelena Ivanović | EXIT Photo Team Duran Duran Sued by Publisher for Reclaiming Song Rights. As is typical in publishing agreements, Duran Duran’s deal with Gloucester Place Music…

‘Pay’ trade mark wars – Paypal and Paytm

‘Pay’ trade mark wars – Paypal and Paytm. Earlier this month, PayPal opposed a trade mark application for the “Paytm” logo in India. PayPal filed its opposition citing the visual…

Sale of “grey” goods in the UK is a criminal offence under the Trade Marks Act 1994

Sale of “grey” goods in the UK is a criminal offence under the Trade Marks Act 1994 Grey market goods/parallel imports are genuinely manufactured goods by the trade mark owner,…

How Not to Have a Counterfeit and Criminal Christmas

How Not to Have a Counterfeit and Criminal Christmas ‘Tis the season of counterfeiting. Intellectual property crime is rife at Christmas. You purchase a product for half the price of…

Kit Kat Barred from Keeping its Four-Finger Bar Trade Mark

Kit Kat Barred from Keeping its Four-Finger Bar Trade Mark Are you #TeamNestlé or #TeamCadbury, as once again the two confectioners battled it out in the courts over trade marks?…

Briffa Celebrates – Lazy Oaf

#BriffaCelebrates – Lazy Oaf Lazy Oaf is one of our favourite clients who is anything but lazy or oafish. Launched more than 15 years ago by Gemma Shiel, Lazy Oaf…

Music & Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is very quickly going to change the world as we know it and the music industry is no exception. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK record labels’…

Acid/Briffa seminar explores alternative design protection through copyright

At a recent ACID and Briffa event following the disappointing Trunki decision (PMS International Limited v Magmatic Limited [2016] UKSC 12), speakers explored IP enforcement in continental Europe and examined…

Are Carlsberg’s new beer patents controversial? Probably …

This year, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted three new patents to Carlsberg (EP2384110, EP2373154 and EP2575433) relating, broadly, to the harvest of kernels from barley plants, the process for…

What’s ‘Appening with Facebook?

Introduction On 25 August 2016, WhatsApp announced that it was changing its terms and privacy policy to (among other things) allow communications with businesses (e.g. potentially an airline could inform…

Gay Cake Verdict – do you need to act?

Every now and then a legal headline catches your attention and you think ‘Oh I had better read that to make sure I am up to date on everything’. Such…

Improving access to justice – year 1 for the shorter trial pilot scheme

The shorter and flexible trial schemes, two pilot schemes being run in the Chancery Division, were launched last year (1 October 2015) with a view to: 1) achieve shorter and…

The Rubik’s Cube shape trade mark declared invalid

In 1999 Seven Towns successfully registered the Rubik’s cube as a 3D EU trade mark. In 2006, a German toy manufacturer, Simba Toys, applied to cancel the trade mark on…

Briffa Celebrates – Adrienne’s 15 years

  Today we celebrate Adrienne, our Office Queen and Practice Manager for 15 years of dedicated and loyal service to all things Briffa. Adrienne has played a huge role in building…

Protecting your ideas and know how – Confidential Information

Do you pitch ideas and designs as part of a tender or potential investment deal? Does your employee have access to your client lists? Does your manufacturer have detailed information…

THE UK IPO NEEDS YOU…. to help modernise the European Copyright Framework

A little over a month ago the European Commission published numerous pieces of draft legislation intended to bring the European copyright framework into the twenty-first century. The proposed legislation includes…

AMS Neve and Heritage Audio in Court – round one

Heritage Audio are nothing if not bold. The Spanish company is currently in litigation with AMS Neve Limited over the manufacture and sale of the look and sound a like…