The UK Intellectual Property Office has produced an easy to digest introduction to patents, designs, trade marks, copyright and designs.

It provides an explanation of the economic importance of intellectual property and the ways in which it can be exploited for a profit, or used to protect the position of a business in the marketplace.

The trademark section includes a basic overview of the purposes underlying this right and outlines the registration process. The ‘At a Glance’ feature allows easy comparison with the protection afforded by other intellectual property rights.

A feature that may be of particular interest to individuals or owners of a Small or Medium sized business is the ‘IP Healthcheck.’ This can be accessed at no cost online and allows you to identify the aspects of your business which may require protection through intellectual property. (more…)

One of the biggest sources of controversy in trademark law at the moment is the use of keywords in Internet advertising. In the last few years, many court cases have been commenced around the world as outraged trademark owners seek to put a stop to what they see as an invisible form of trademark infringement.

The controversy surrounding advertising keywords and registered trademarks

Keyword advertising is most commonly used by search engines to supplement ‘natural’ search results. The way it works is simple. Advertisers pay a fee for their link to appear on the results page when a user searches for certain phrases. So for example, a retailer that sells a popular brand of flowers in their store might like to use the brand of flowers as a trigger for their adverts. This would allow them to inform consumers that the particular brand of flowers is available in-store.

There is currently nothing in the infrastructure of the sponsored links services that search engines offer to stop advertisers selecting trademarks and brand names to act as those triggers, and here lies the problem. A trader could theoretically use a competitor’s more reputable trademark to divert consumers towards their own website, by buying the competitor’s brand as a trigger keyword. Naturally, the trademark owners are less than happy about this, seeing it as an unfair use of their carefully developed goodwill. There is not yet a straightforward legal answer to the question of whether such use is indeed unfair (though there may be soon, at least in Europe). (more…)

Introducing the Community Trade Mark

The Community Trade Mark (CTM) allows an applicant to register a trademark valid in every Member State of the European Union with a single application. It was introduced as part of the harmonisation of the Internal Market in the European Union, the same project that gave rise to the Euro, as well as many other significant developments in economic regulation law.

It prevents the single economic market of the European Union being disrupted by businesses registering national trade marks in each Member State; such a situation could allow the trade mark holder to stop goods that they have released for sale in one EU country being later resold in another (so called ‘parallel imports’). The motivation for doing this would be to facilitate the marketing of goods to each country at a different price (in some countries, it is cheaper to bring a product to market, making it possible to sell the goods on for less), without worrying that the price would be undercut by third parties importing the goods from a different EU country. (more…)