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Everywhere you go people are talking about going green and how it impacts the environment. From chemicals to plastic bags, people are trying to come up with new and innovative ways to make our planet more environmentally sustainable.  

We recently hosted a webinar with Richard Tromans, Founder of Tromans Consulting, which advises lawyers on the adoption of Legal AI. We explored the relationship between machine and lawyers and what that burgeoning relationship might mean for us all.

The line between regular sports and eSports is not always immediately clear to those outside the world of competitive gaming. The basis of eSports is founded on the supply of games by developers and played to a professional and competitive level with a number of tournaments around the world.

Somedays it feels as though our entire lives are online - social media interactions and events, online learning, work, leisure pursuits of all kinds - dating and romance, shopping, music, fashion and even politics. And many, many pictures of cats.

There are core fundamentals at the heart of every arena of life and trademark law is no exception. For the trademark attorneys who help their clients create and protect strong brands, communicating these core fundamentals is essential to their role. So what might they want you to understand about trademarks?

Obtaining a clear idea of how much it will cost to register a trademark in the US (or anywhere for that matter!) is difficult because the answer will always be...it depends. Specifically it depends on how many classes you wish to register across, if it is based on use or intended use, whether you will clear the mark yourself or use the services of a clearance vendor and whether you intend to engage the services of an attorney to manage the clearance and/or filing or use the self-service online options at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Amid all of the complexities of the intellectual property world, it can often be the simplest, smallest detail that causes unexpected issues often years after the fact. Never is this more pertinent than in the ownership of trademarks (or any intellectual property). Above all else, trademarks are a commercial asset mostly granted on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis. The caveat to that being that they must be ‘used’ by the person or entity whose name is on the registration and that person or entity must have the legal capacity to own a commercial asset. In the birth and evolution of a business, challenges with those two elements arise surprisingly often….and all round the world!

One of the surprises in the analysis of the trademark applications of the “Top 200 Law Firms in Europe” is the spectacular growth of applications from China since 2010. There seems to have been a shift in the tide in the Chinese perspective and many new developments that are transforming both the attitude to IP protection within China and accessibility of information to those from outside the region. Perhaps this remodelling of the system has inspired and encouraged more Chinese companies to ‘go global’!

From the outside, the process of a trademark registration is a relatively straightforward one. You create a product. Give it a name. Decide that you need to protect that name. Run some clearance searches. Discover that your name is not quite as original as you thought. Think a bit more about the name. Find one that is protectable. File it using the online services supplied by many Patent & Trademark Offices. Get registered. Renew as appropriate and repeat across as many regions as you require.

In real life, however, as with so many things it is not as simple in practice as it is in theory.

In an increasingly competitive world, trademarks are an exceptionally popular option to maintain your corporate identity in a global marketplace where counterfeits of your product are almost an indicator of the level of your success. But how much popularity is too much?