Copyright protection allows you to control the use that others can make of the work. This means that using the work without the owner’s permission can amount to copyright infringement, which is a civil offence.

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A registered patent comes with a set of claims. These specify the breadth of the patented invention. If a competitor’s product or process incorporates all of the elements of just one of the claims, that is enough to infringe that patent.

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If someone uses your trademark without permission, or if you think someone is using or trying to use a trade mark similar to yours, you may have a claim for trademark infringement.

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We specialise in filing and protecting design rights, as well as taking swift action to resolve disputes.

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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.