Find a Fantastic Lawyer®

WardblawG

Tag: brand protection Legal Blogs & News

Edinburgh Sheriff Court Looking Glass

How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD: Chapter 8 of 10: Look and Feel

The approach taken in Navitaire was reaffirmed in the recent decision in Nova v Mazooma Games, where it was similarly held that the reproduction of the look and feel of an existing program in original source code did not infringe copyright in the original program. However, both Navitaire and Nova concern programs with high levels of abstraction and may be limited to their facts. It is therefore entirely possible that the “look and feel” of a program in a future case may be protected if there are less abstract concepts and closer similarities between programs. Thus, we may not have seen the end of “look and feel” protection through copyright.

Read More
Creativity in Constantinople 500 AD

How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 5 of 10: Creative Commons Licences

WardblawG uses one of the most common types of Creative Commons. See the CCL summary page and the full licence for more information. There are other different types of Creative Commons that may be considered.
By saying you grant a certain type of Creative Commons Licence, you are doing just that: no fancy legal documents required, because they’ve already been drafted for you. In case you haven’t discovered by now, WardblawG is a massive fan of freeing up information and keeping it simple. Welcome to FOI 2.0?

Read More
Copyright protecting Medusa

How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 4 of 10: Copyright

Next, you might need to pull your hair out over getting copyright protection for your written work. But wait a minute, no you don’t! Copyright is granted to you automatically by the nice people that drafted and agreed the international copyright treaties. Such copyright protection exists for anything you write, generally provided that it is your own material. To avoid plagiarism and copyright breach for using other people’s work, consider referencing them or getting consent from them first: it’s just like being back at university writing thousands of words that nobody will ever read; unless YoublawG them.

As Forest Gump might say, that’s all WardblawG has to say about that.

A branch of copyright and particularly relevant for web 2.0, Creative Commons Licences are the subject of Chapter 5 of this series, which follows this post.

Read More
Greyfriar's Bobby Edinburgh Scotland Protect Your Trade Mark

How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 3 of 10: Trade Marks

If you take one thing away from this, it should be this practical but general word of advice:

If your business and its model are analogous to another successful and well-protected business and if your brand name is unique, not in the dictionary, not an industry word and not confusingly similar to another business, then take inspiration from the trade mark applications of that other successful business, but do consider every application on its own merits; and

If you are in any doubt about trade mark registrability, research further or seek professional advice from a lawyer, brand protector or trade mark agent. In WardblawG’s experience, trade mark agents are most useful when registrability of your brand as a trade mark is clearly problematic, when you need to overcome objections or field queries from an examiner, or when you have a large portfolio of trade marks to register and maintain.

Read More