16th Mar 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly had a huge impact on just about every aspect of our lives – transforming kitchens across the land into home offices and giving patent attorneys a crash course in the joys and challenges of home-schooling. One year on since the first UK lockdown and the ‘new normal’ no longer feels very ‘new’.
10th Feb 2021
Last year, we reviewed a United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (IPO) report on sectors of the economy which make the most intensive use of intellectual property (IP) rights, and how much these sectors contribute to the UK economy. This week, the European Patent Office and the European Union Intellectual Property Office have jointly published a report on the commercial benefit of owning IP rights to European companies
9th Feb 2021
Wearable technology has become increasingly prevalent in recent times – almost a third of UK consumers now own a fitness band or smartwatch – with adoption of these devices expected to continue to increase in the coming years. This blog take a look at three companies in the wearables industry – Garmin, Suunto, and Fitbit – their patent portfolios, and some of the IP-related challenges they have to face to ensure their products get protected.
8th Feb 2021
Retail sales have been steadily shifting online since web browsers were first created in the 1990s. Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics shows us that “Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales” increased from 6.8% in February 2010, to 11.7% in February 2015, to 19.1% in February 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing the UK into various stages of lockdown since March 2020, internet sales ballooned to a record 36.2% of all retail sales in November 2020.
28th Oct 2020
The United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) recently released a report on sectors of the economy which make the most intensive use of intellectual property (IP) rights, and how much these sectors contribute to the UK economy.
9th Oct 2020
Amazon’s intellectual property (IP) policy is designed to protect sellers by preventing the sale of counterfeit or knockoff goods on Amazon’s various websites. But, what can you do, as a seller, if you think one or more of your product listings has been unfairly removed because of an existing registered design (or design right)?
21st Sep 2020
The EUIPO is Now a Member of the WIPO Digital Access Service. As of 12 September 2020, the EUIPO is allowing registered Community design applicants to both deposit and retrieve priority documents using the WIPO DAS system. This is a step that has been long awaited by design attorneys given that 98% of registered Community design applications are now filed online.
25th Aug 2020
We consider invalidity decisions issued by the EUIPO during the second quarter of 2020, from 1 April 2020 to 30 June 2020. Registered Community designs (RCDs) protect the shape and appearance of new products across the whole of the EU. Since national court decisions on RCDs are rare, decisions by the EUIPO’s Invalidity Division help us to understand how the validity of an RCD is interpreted.