Intellectual Property Disputes

Clients and work in this area include:

• We are acting for a famous French entertainment brand in relation to the unauthorised use of the brand by various businesses for business and product names in the UK. 
• We are representing a well-known company in litigation over the use of their trade marks as Google Adwords by a high street retailer.
• Advising a leading UK furniture manufacturer regarding a registered design infringement in relation to a copy of one of their sofa designs.
• Advising a client in the mining industry regarding passing off of their name.
• Advising a software development company on a copyright infringement claim in the construction industry.
• Advising a financial services company in three way negotiations involving their core brands. 
• Advising and representing before the Copyright Tribunal a collecting society on a disputed licensing scheme.
• Assisting an individual to recover confidential, personal and financial information taken from a computer system without consent.
• Acted for Wildwood Trading Limited in its successful High Court claim against three defendants who were importing and selling copies of Wildwood’s sleigh bed design. The case involved applying the arguments used successfully by us in the earlier High Court claim by Nouveau Fabrics against Voyage Decoration.
• Advising a Chinese porcelain factory with regard to Community design registrations which infringe its designs.
• We are assisting a venture capital company in a passing off claim against a new entrant to their market who is using a similar trade mark  to promote their business. The matter is ongoing. 
• Our client entered into a hotel management agreement that included provisions governing the use of the owner’s brands. The owner alleged a breach of those provisions and sought to terminate the multi-million pound management agreement. We successfully defended the subsequent High Court proceedings against the client. The case took just four weeks from the issue of the Claim Form to come to trial.
• Acted for Willis Gambier in a claim against MFI for the sale of alleged copies of bedroom furniture. This was a complex case involving eleven different designs for the furniture from two ranges. The case was concluded following a mediation. 
• Acted for a major exporter of children’s novelty confectionary when our client was accused by a customer of supplying products which infringed a third party’s patents.  Our advice led to the customer deciding not to pursue the claim. 
• Advising a leading bathroom supply company on a patent and design right infringement claim against another party relating to a device created for the rapid movement of goods within factory and distribution premises.
• Our client was a developer who acquired an area of land that had the benefit of planning permission to build a leisure and hotel complex. The original architect made a claim for copyright infringement in respect of the proposed use of the planning permission plans. We successfully fought off that claim.
• Our client was involved in the provision of technology allowing others to retrieve information from third party websites.  A claim was made against our client by a website operator that our client was engaging in copyright infringement. We advised our client on issues of infringement and jurisdiction.
• Our client, the artist Jack Vettriano, discovered that hand painted copies of his works were being produced in China and distributed through internet sites in North America and Western Europe. We took action on Jack’s behalf to shut down the sales through the websites. We co-ordinated these activities with lawyers in North America. 
• Our client, a UK based company, lost a number of its software development team to a new start-up company in Russia. Our client discovered that the new company was seeking to supply its services to our client’s customers. We took action on behalf of our client, assisted by our Moscow office, and reached a speedy resolution. 
• Acted for a financial services client in defending a claim for copyright infringement brought by a competitor. The claim revolved around the creation of software for the client to run its back office system by the same team that created the competitor’s back office system. We successfully defended the claim. 
• Acted for FTSE in a number of cases involving the retrieval of domain names.
• Acted for a pharmaceutical company in a dispute with its licensor regarding access to clinical trial data relating to the patented product. 
• Successfully defended our food manufacturing client from claims that its products infringed third party patents.