Blog & News

‘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…

Donald Trump, Copyright Pirate?

Navigating the world though racial and ethnic stereotyping while landing on an island somewhere near you for the odd grope; it seems Donald Trump can now add Copyright Pirate to…

May the Force be with you (if you have a licence to use the Force …)

The Star Wars brand was born in 1977 with the release of the first film in the series: simply, “Star Wars”. It’s almost 40 years later and if you’re not…

Guess? What happened with Gucci’s trade mark

Do you see a ‘G’, ‘X’, ‘3’, or ‘E’? This was one of the considerations of the EU General Court in dismissing Gucci’s appeals against the Board of Appeal’s decision…

Don’t like Mondays – it could be worse

Sir Bob Geldof has faced worse blows of course but he can now add ‘being sued for millions by former band mate’ to the list. Johnnie Moylett (aka Johnnie Fingers)…

McDonalds facing a string of copyright infringement suits

Oh dear oh dear, what is the matter with McDonalds? Their corporate website is full of warm and fluffy statements about how seriously they take their corporate social responsibility. They…

Infringing Playboy and it’s not Trump!

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have ruled that hyperlinks can infringe copyright within the EU. In 2011, GS Media published a report regarding nude photos of…

Cocktails!

The popularity of cocktails and cocktail bars shows no sign of abating with cocktails being sold more and more in many bars and pubs alongside the more standard drinks. Here’s…

A – bit too much TalkTalk!! – £400,000.00 fine for data breach

The Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) has issued a record monetary penalty of £400,000 against telecommunications group TalkTalk under the Data Protection Act 1998. The fine is for serious contraventions of…