Introduction
A Briefest of Histories

Further Information:

• The legal issues affecting a new brand name
• The legal issues affecting a new logo
• The legal issues affecting a new design
• Protecting a new brand name or new logo
• Protecting new designs
• Protecting ideas
• A Trade Mark Attorney
• Enforcement
• Defending a trade mark
• Defending other IP rights
• Delimitation of rights
• Licensing, if undertaken properly, is a highly effective tool for exploiting IP. For example, it enables
the extension of a brand or trade mark to products and services other than those for which it is known,
or the manufacture of a product (by a third party) for which the IP (a trade mark, patent or design
registration) owner may not have the resources or capability. Licensing is used by many fashion
labels to extend their brands to products such as fragrances and jewellery. Contrary to what many
might say, licensing is essential to the proper maintenance of the owner’s IP rights. Without the
controls present in properly drafted licences (which are essentially contracts), the licensor’s IP rights
may not be properly exploited and may even be jeopardised. For example, the DUNHILL brand has a
cachet which depends on all of the products (whether perfume, clothing, jewellery or pens) sold under
the brand being of consistently high quality. Licensing arrangements incorporating suitable controls
enable the brand owners to maintain uniformly high quality (as well as a consistent design philosophy)
in those products which are not manufactured and marketed directly by them. Without such controls in
place the brand would soon lose its cachet and its association with a single identity, thereby resulting
in the diminution of the value of the brand. The consequences will be the loss of the validity of many
of the DUNHILL trade mark registrations and a loss of ownership.
• Franchising
• Exploitation of IP rights
• Exploitation of Intellectual Property rights: raising funds and securitisation
• Intellectual Property Rights as investments
• Acquisition and transfer
• Registration of transactions
• E-commerce and the internet
• Trade Marks and the internet/e-commerce
• Domain names, “ownership” of a name and cyber-squatting
• Disputing domain names
• Websites and e-commerce – legal issues
• Contractual issues in e-commerce
• The legal issues affecting advertising
• Intellectual Property and Insurance
• Intellectual Property and Insolvency

© 2008 Decisis Limited.