Organisation: House of Lords

Tougher penalties and claim validation will give more weight to green ads done right, but murky guidelines leave pioneering companies guessing, argues this week’s opinion column

18 May 2024

INTA has filed an amicus brief disagreeing with the court’s interpretation of ‘article’ under the Indian Designs Act, arguing that a recent decision could leave granted designs vulnerable to cancellation. 

09 May 2024

In Whatman International Limited v Mehta, the Delhi High Court has taken a stern stance against habitual infringers. The decision shows that the Indian courts are increasingly adopting a zero-tolerance policy in such cases.

28 February 2019

Preliminary injunctions can be a valuable tool for rights holders, but they are not always straightforward to obtain. Lawyers from Hogan Lovells provide a comparative global overview of strategies for obtaining them in different jurisdictions

29 April 2016

The Law Commission has published a bill to harmonise UK actions for groundless threats of infringement, making assertion of IP rights and discovery of primary infringers more straightforward. The proposal is to conform the provisions for trademarks and design rights with those already in place for patents.

09 November 2015

In <I>Vertical Leisure Limited v Poleplus Limited</I>, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has found an employer to be vicariously liable for passing off arising from its employee’s registration of a number of domains which infringed the IP rights of the claimant. It held that registering the domain names was the kind of act the employee was employed to do and, in doing so, he was furthering his employer’s interest rather than his own.

21 May 2015

UK MPs have voted to approve legislation for plain packaging on tobacco products. With a range of other countries currently proposing its introduction in the imminent future, one commentator told <I>WTR</I> that momentum is now behind plain packaging.

11 March 2015

In <I>National Guild of Removers and Storers Ltd v Milner</I>, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has found that marks used to identify members of an association need not be registered as collective marks. The ruling provides a route whereby applicants may file an ordinary trademark application and subsequently use it as a collective mark, thereby altogether circumventing an application for a collective mark.

29 May 2014

The UK government has taken what one opposition Member of Parliament terms “a U-turn on a U-turn” and announced a new independent review on the issue of standardised tobacco packaging. Coupled with legislation that would allow the government to bring forward regulations to introduce standardised packaging, plain packaging in the UK could be a reality by 2015.

28 November 2013

The UK IP Bill – proposed legislation that would introduce criminal sanctions for infringement of industrial design rights – was passed yesterday by the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the UK Parliament. However, the potential criminalisation of certain instances of designs infringement has met with criticism from some sections of the IP community.

31 July 2013