Creative Lawyers for Creative Business

Mr Karl Kahn is celebrating victory over Easy Group IP the company that holds the intellectual property belonging to Stelious Haji-Ioannou’s easy empire. After two years of arguing EasyGroup IP have dropped the case against Mr Kahn’s Easypizza Limited and have agreed to pay EasyPizza’s costs and not interfere with Easypizza’s business again, specifically not to issue any further proceedings against Easypizza Limited without the permission of the court.

EasyGroup’s claim was that the domain names Easypizza.co.uk infringed its rights in easyGroup including Easyjet and other easy enterprises. Kahn has been trading as Easypizza since 1997 and has a customer base across the London Boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington. Mr Kahn registered the domain name www.easypizza.co.uk in 1999. Easygroup launched its own pizza business under the domain name www.easypizza.com servicing towns in Sussex in 2003. Easygroup started its claim against Mr Kahn in 2004 one year after launching its own pizza business and 7 years after Mr Kahn started his.

Briffa Comments.
This case tells us absolutely nothing we did not know before namely:

1. That EasyGroup have no monopoly over trading names beginning with the word ‘easy’.
2. That this is the case no matter that they have a registered trade mark in word ‘easy’ or a massive budget to protect themselves from what they call ‘brand thieves’ and
   
3. That lawyers really should check the facts properly before starting legal action.

The case does however raise some important questions namely:

1. Whether it really is a good idea for brand owners to approach brand protection issues in the way EasyGroup do?
   
2. Whether EasyGroup should consider a change of lawyers; and
   
3. Whether an apology from Stelios to Karl may also have been a good idea.

More info Margaret@briffa.com

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