In the lead up to the Christmas and new year season, most of us are accustomed to seeing television advertisements featuring well-known actors and personalities endorsing a range of luxury products such as perfumes and watches. While it is obvious that a personality like Sean Connery will have been handsomely rewarded for endorsing a famous brand of watch, such endorsements raise the interesting question as to what extent a person, famous or otherwise, can control the use of his or her image or likeness in the sale of products or services. Can, for example, Sean Connery stop me from selling 2020 calendars bearing his image on the front cover?
At least in the UK there is as yet no recognised legal right of publicity or personality. This means that a person has no specific legal right in the UK to control the unauthorised use of their image or appearance.
That said, that does not mean that persons such as celebrities are not without some legal remedies. It is...
These days, any of us can be a blogger. All you need is somewhere to post your content, and an interesting angle on life – be it sports, politics, travel, food, music, you name it – you can blog your perspective on it. What’s more, you can attract a worldwide audience of thousands or even millions.
However, as well as a web presence and a flair for writing, you should also develop an awareness of intellectual property (“IP” for short) and its impact on your blogging activities.
IP is essentially about protecting our intellectual creations, and that includes of course our blog entries. But whatever A has protected, B may infringe. So, when we consider blogging and IP, you need to look in both directions: how can you, as a blogger, protect your IP and also, how can you ensure that your blog does not infringe the IP of others? Here today we look at “A” – what you have protected. In next week’s blog, we look at “B”...
People often ask the question, what is a brand, or what is intellectual property, and is a brand intellectual property. Before I answer that question let’s look at what the terms mean.
A good starting point to understanding what brand and branding mean is to note the word’s origins. It started as a term to describe the identifying mark that was burned on livestock with a branding iron. That was how people could tell who owned the cattle.
Although the concept of branding has its roots in this visual imagery it’s important to appreciate that branding has moved on considerably since those times. While the visual identity matters, of course, branding is nowadays about so much more than a logo, or visual designs. The visual identity is the final stage of branding not the first.
The Design of Your Business is Key
Branding nowadays is much more about the way you design your business than the designs you get for your business to use.
Even small...
We recently launched a survey about intellectual property because I’d noticed that clients and prospective clients often struggled to know what IP is, and what’s involved to identify and protect it.
So, if you’ve ever wondered how to identify IP issues when branding or developing a new product or service, what you need to do, when you need to do it, and what steps are involved to protect your IP, then you may be interested in the results. 75% of entrepreneurs do not know what IP issues arise when implementing new ideas. The rest only had a vague idea. As for when to protect IP, only 9% said that yes they know when to protect IP and how to protect it. The vast majority did not know how or when to protect their IP, and are not confident about how to check whether they may legally use a name.
Consequently, following these survey results I’ve decided to run a beta version of my upcoming IP Fundamentals e-Course. This will be half the price of the...
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Shireen Smith
Author
Shireen Smith is a lawyer and founder of a successful law firm, Azrights. She is a bestselling author on Amazon of two books on intellectual property Legally Branded and Intellectual Property Revolution. She is also a trained journalist. As well as advising top blue chip companies like Reuters Shireen has supported hundreds of SMEs to protect their intellectual property when launching, growing and exiting their businesses. She brings the wealth of insights this background has provided her with to her training courses.
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