Tag: Spoor & Fisher

Trademark practitioners always get excited when the shape of a product finds itself at the centre of a trademark dispute. Although the shape of goods generally finds itself at the very bottom of the spectrum when it comes to distinctiveness and public perception, most trademark legislation worldwide allows for shapes to be registrable as trademarks.

In the last decade or two, there have been significant advances in cloud computing, the provision of software-implemented services (Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) and web-based applications. These offerings rely on software that runs on a remote server and are accessed by users from their own computer, via a network connection (rather than being locally installed on the internal memory of a user’s computer).

Not resting on its laurels since releasing Squid Game, its most watched series to date, Netflix has been hard at work – filing trade mark applications worldwide to protect the Squid Game name and logos for a wide variety of products and services.

Having formally left the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom (UK) is now in the transition period, which allows it to remain part of the EU intellectual property (IP) system until 31 December 2020. That’s only a few weeks away.

Social networking is increasingly becoming a daily ritual of many South Africans. According to World Wide Worx’s SA Social Media Landscape 2017, Facebook is...

Read our exclusive cover story entitled THE ART OF POSTING - ARE YOU BREACHING COPYRIGHT? by Hugh Melamdowitz, Partner, Spoor & Fisher as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the December/January 2017/18 edition of BusinessBrief.