Owners and managers of businesses with intellectual property (IP) assets –whether a corporate name or more complex technology - need a good understanding of how these assets contribute to corporate value and whether or not that value can be assessed and be recognised in financial statements. For legal, accounting, banking and venture capital professionals these [...]

Posted: October 31st, 2007 under Intellectual Property.
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Most employers will have experienced occasions when they have had reason to doubt that an employee off sick is genuinely ill.  An all too frequent occurrence is the employee that goes off claiming ‘stress’ when disciplinary proceedings are imminent. A recent decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has called into question how far employers [...]

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under Employment/HR.
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The European Court (Court of First Instance) has overruled a decision of the European trade mark registry and allowed a distinctive design of loudspeaker by Bang and Olufsen to be registered as a trade mark. The key to this decision is a finding that the design is inherently distinctive. Several applications to register the shapes [...]

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under Intellectual Property.
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The Court of Appeal has interpreted narrowly the scope of protection in the UK given to registered Community designs, in a surprising judgement handed down on the 10th of October 2007.
Overturning the decision of the UK High Court, the Court of Appeal decided that the shape of an Air Wick Odour Stop bottle manufactured by [...]

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under Intellectual Property.
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Developers must ensure that they fully consider whether any adjoining owners’ rights of light will be breached well before they commence work on a development. That was the message from a recent case before the Court of Appeal in which a developer was heavily penalised because they did not take this into consideration.
In Regan [...]

Posted: October 8th, 2007 under Commercial Property.
Comments: none