Intellectual property

Ensuring the full potential of your IP assets is both protected and realised.

Your innovative business ideas and the brand you build around them are inherently unique. Intellectual Property is the legal framework that supports these distinctive business assets, whose value may be overlooked as it doesn’t make a direct contribution to the balance sheet.

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Patrick Wheeler
Partner - Head of IP & Data Protection
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Proactive and commercially focused guidance to grow your business

It is vital in today’s competitive market to establish, protect and exploit these rights in ways that contribute to growing your business and driving it forward. To support you in this process, you should be working closely with a legal team which can provide you with proactive and commercially focused guidance.

Our Intellectual property team advises businesses across a wide range of industries on the commercial elements of intellectual property. Our expertise covers every angle of buying and selling IP rights, brand licensing, franchising agreements, sponsorship, joint ventures and research and development agreements, to name but a few.

We invest time in gaining a thorough understanding of the specifics of your business and your overarching strategy. We can then provide you with uniquely tailored and creative advice which achieves your objectives and ensures the full potential of your IP assets is both protected and realised.

YOUR IP RIGHTS HEALTH CHECK

Are you certain your business’ IP rights are protected?

The Collyer Bristow IPR health check is a short test designed to focus on the way you currently manage your IPR and highlight potential risks and opportunities. Get an immediate diagnosis on the health your businesses IP rights.

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SPOTLIGHT

E-Commerce Agreementsopen

As the opportunities for digital businesses grow, so does the legislation. E-commerce regulations, distance selling regulations, consumer protection from unfair trading, electronic marketing regulations, GDPR and their international equivalents – all these regulations need to be complied with before you can sell online.

We specialise in helping businesses navigate the complex area of e-commerce law, including the additional complexities associated with operating your businesses in foreign countries over the web. Our advice includes:

Website and mobile app development agreements
Hosting agreements
IT services contracts
Software licence agreements
Terms and conditions of sale to consumers, including cooling-off periods and cancellation
Website terms of use
Protecting intellectual property on the site (images, content, artwork)
Privacy and cookies policies
Data processing agreements and agreements governing international transfers of personal data
Contracting with overseas customers, clients and suppliers
Compliance with industry-specific regulatory requirements, such as secondary ticketing for events
Agreements for platforms acting as an online intermediary service
Harmonisation between your terms of business and other commercial contracts, such as distribution agreements.

Our commercial solicitors have experience drafting all types of e-commerce agreements, with a thorough understanding of laws relating to online trading. Whatever your commercial objectives, we are confident we have a solution that achieves the dual goals of preserving the customer experience while ensuring your company is well protected from risk.

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IP rights health check

Are you certain your business’ IP rights are protected?

The Collyer Bristow IPR health check is a short test designed to focus on the way you currently manage your IPR and highlight potential risks and opportunities.

Start the test.

Confidential information

Every business will create or hold information that is private and/or commercially sensitive. It is important to take steps to protect the confidentiality of that information to avoid it becoming public knowledge or ending up in the hands of a competitor. Collyer Bristow can advise on practical steps to protect confidentiality, as well as legal remedies if you discover or suspect that such information has been or may be misused.

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Copyright

Copyright protects original material from being copied, which is essential if you want to commercialise your creations or defend them against infringement.

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Database rights

Databases are becoming increasingly important and valuable assets for business. Steps should be taken to protect what you have compiled and prevent unauthorised copying and misuse.

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Design Rights

In the UK, protecting your design rights is a complex and multi-layered process. There are both registered design rights and unregistered design rights to consider, and it can be difficult to determine whether a product’s novel features are capable of design rights protection or whether patent protection may be the more appropriate option. Our specialist lawyers can help you cut through the confusion. We specialise in protecting and commercialising design rights, including taking swift action to resolve disputes, and advising on exploitation licences and agreements.

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Patents

Our patent lawyers have years of specialist patent experience. We can help you ensure your inventions are not used without your permission – and defend you if someone accuses you of infringing their rights.

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Performers' rights

Alongside copyright, performers have several rights in relation to their performances, known collectively as ‘performers’ rights.’ The rights make it possible for performers to control and be compensated for the commercial exploitation of their performances and take action against bootlegging.

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Trademarks

Ensuring your trademarks are registered and protected prevents others from exploiting your most critical assets, such as your brand name, logo, goodwill and reputation.

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Brand protection

A brand is a valuable asset to any business and always worth protecting. Our expert team can help ensure that your company’s name, logo, trademarks and other brand assets are ring-fenced, registered, protected and not infringed upon by another business.

Our brand protection services

We help businesses of all sizes and maturity identify the distinguishing characteristics of their company and take steps to strengthen, protect and enforce them. Our services include:

Brand audits – a thorough examination of your company’s IP assets, including those you own, use or licence, to assess risk while helping business leaders make informed brand strategy decisions.
Brand creation – ensuring that the names, logos, slogans and mascots you are creating are protectable and registrable.
IP rights clearance – our specialist business IP lawyers will make the appropriate searches to uncover any third-party rights that may restrict the use of your chosen brand marks either now or in the future.
Brand protections – we look at your business as a whole to identify which potential rights and trade marks you should register to stop your brand from being used by others without your permission.
Brand ownership structures – sometimes, it is helpful to ring-fence brand assets and place ownership in a different company, to ensure you retain control of the brand if the trading company gets into financial difficulty. We provide guidance on this.
Enforcement – our dedicated intellectual property litigators can help enforce your IP rights in a variety of ways and where necessary through the courts, both inside and outside of the UK.

Why work with Collyer Bristow?

We have a strong reputation in the field of intellectual property and an even stronger reputation for creative problem solving, dealing with brand protection issues efficiently before they snowball into bigger problems. We work hard to get under the bonnet of your business. This tells us what’s important to your company, so we can develop strategies that protect you from copycat competitors.