Hot topics

The average consumer may think that the bottles of their favourite wines come in standard shapes that are free to all producers to use. However, bottle shapes can be protected as trademarks, so long as they meet the necessary requirements.

Of course every business should undertake trademark clearance searching before launching a brand, but not every small or start-up business understands why – until they receive a cease and desist letter demanding that they change their branding. Vanessa Harrow offers some advice.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its 66th Annual General Meeting in Montreal earlier this month. Trademark Attorney Laurence Rivière provides a summary of the hot topics under discussion.

When it comes to celebrity tattoos, the story is always who's got one and where – but what about the artist who created the design? We redress the balance.

Integrating the GDPR into the daily life of a business is a far from obvious matter. Developing employees’ awareness of the GDPR and training them to apply it to their daily work is a key element of the process. Anca Draganescu-Pinawin explains why.

You can’t escape memes on social media these days, so it’s no surprise to find that corporations are beginning to get in on the act. 

Applications for non-traditional trademarks, such as sounds, smells and motion marks, make up only a small percentage of annual trademark applications in the EU. However, their importance is beginning to grow. 

The English Premier League revealed this month that it had seized more than 160,000 counterfeit items, worth more than £5 million, in the past year.

Graffiti and, more broadly, street art was once considered more of a nuisance than an art form. While the circumstances of its creation may be legally ambiguous, street art has undoubted creative and monetary value.

A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU has broadened the options for taking action against online trademark infringement, by giving trademark owners a wider choice of court, as Casper Hemelrijk explains.

Raising the profile of IP in corporate boardrooms is key to moving conversations away from acquisition cost and on to business potential, says Chantal Koller. 

With an estimated three billion people using smartphones and other electronic handheld devices worldwide, the importance of obtaining IP protection for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is only set to grow. Casper Hemelrijk offers advice on creating an effective protection strategy.