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August 2010

How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 9 of 10: Further Reading

August 30, 2010 Corporate and Commercial

So that’s a brief introductory guide to protecting your IP online. To learn more about IP law and IP protection, I would recommend strongly that you visit WardblawG’s friends at the award winning IP blog, the IPKat, founded and managed by Professor Jeremy Phillips. Subscription to Jeremy’s Google groups will provide your inbox with a flurry of IP related email gems every day plus pictures of one or two cats in peculiar poses. WardblawG’s Gavin Ward’s cat or, as Jeremy puts it, owner Missy has already made one appearance on Wednesday Whimsies.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your BranD: Chapter 8 of 10: Look and Feel

August 25, 2010 Corporate and Commercial

The approach taken in Navitaire was reaffirmed in the recent decision in Nova v Mazooma Games, where it was similarly held that the reproduction of the look and feel of an existing program in original source code did not infringe copyright in the original program. However, both Navitaire and Nova concern programs with high levels of abstraction and may be limited to their facts. It is therefore entirely possible that the “look and feel” of a program in a future case may be protected if there are less abstract concepts and closer similarities between programs. Thus, we may not have seen the end of “look and feel” protection through copyright.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 7 of 10: Business Method Patents

August 24, 2010 Corporate and Commercial

WardblawG has 30,000 very meaningful hits to its name, although 1000 of which have probably been made by me, my family and friends. Thank you to everyone who has viewed, subscribed and commented. As promised, today’s post is Chapter 7 of 10: Business Method Patents. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 shall follow, with Part 10 being published on my first day as a qualified solicitor in Scotland.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 6 of 10: Design, Right

August 23, 2010 Corporate and Commercial

Once you can sleep at night knowing you have ownership rights, you can decide whether to leave them unregistered or proceed to register them. Unregistered design rights overlap with copyright to an extent and the protection afforded is decent to say the least. Go for registered designs if the design is more complex and vital to your business. If you don’t have the time or the cash for registered designs, just take the cheap practical option of sealing your design in an envelope and mailing them back to yourself through recorded delivery.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 5 of 10: Creative Commons Licences

August 22, 2010 Creative Commons

WardblawG uses one of the most common types of Creative Commons. See the CCL summary page and the full licence for more information. There are other different types of Creative Commons that may be considered.
By saying you grant a certain type of Creative Commons Licence, you are doing just that: no fancy legal documents required, because they’ve already been drafted for you. In case you haven’t discovered by now, WardblawG is a massive fan of freeing up information and keeping it simple. Welcome to FOI 2.0?

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 4 of 10: Copyright

August 21, 2010 Copyright

Next, you might need to pull your hair out over getting copyright protection for your written work. But wait a minute, no you don’t! Copyright is granted to you automatically by the nice people that drafted and agreed the international copyright treaties. Such copyright protection exists for anything you write, generally provided that it is your own material. To avoid plagiarism and copyright breach for using other people’s work, consider referencing them or getting consent from them first: it’s just like being back at university writing thousands of words that nobody will ever read; unless YoublawG them.

As Forest Gump might say, that’s all WardblawG has to say about that.

A branch of copyright and particularly relevant for web 2.0, Creative Commons Licences are the subject of Chapter 5 of this series, which follows this post.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 3 of 10: Trade Marks

August 20, 2010 Intellectual Property

If you take one thing away from this, it should be this practical but general word of advice:

If your business and its model are analogous to another successful and well-protected business and if your brand name is unique, not in the dictionary, not an industry word and not confusingly similar to another business, then take inspiration from the trade mark applications of that other successful business, but do consider every application on its own merits; and

If you are in any doubt about trade mark registrability, research further or seek professional advice from a lawyer, brand protector or trade mark agent. In WardblawG’s experience, trade mark agents are most useful when registrability of your brand as a trade mark is clearly problematic, when you need to overcome objections or field queries from an examiner, or when you have a large portfolio of trade marks to register and maintain.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 2 of 10: Domain Names

August 19, 2010 Domain names

The second step I would suggest is creating at least one domain name, ideally a .com registration reflecting verbatim your brand name. Do this through a reputable host of which there are many.

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Chapter 1 of 10: Branding

August 18, 2010 Branding

Intellectual Property (“IP”) As every business knows or should know, you must develop and protect your IP. For various reasons, this has become even more important throughout the recession. In essence, IP is the outward image of your business and should be protected in a strong manner. Branding First, although it might seem like putting […]

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How to Dominate the Internet: Book One: Protect Your Brand: Prologue

August 18, 2010 Intellectual Property

This blawg was founded on 23 May 2010. I decided that, instead of mainly writing articles for other journals, I would like to write articles to share legal information with a wider audience. I am a proponent of social media networking and believe that law students, lawyers and law firms have a great deal of valuable information that should be shared in an optimal manner.

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Welcome to Law 2.0

August 10, 2010 Law Practice

WardblawG will burst through the 20,000 hit mark today. Partnerships are forming by the day, most recently with Google ads and with lawyers and entrepreneurs around the world. With that in mind, it is now time to unleash the future of law: Welcome to Law 2.0…

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A Fresh Wave of Liquor Licensing Hell: the Devil Went Down to Scotland

August 7, 2010 Liquor Licensing

Having experienced the chaos in September 2009 first-hand, working with some of Scotland’s largest alcohol suppliers and sellers, WardblawG agrees with most of what Mr Johnston has to say and, so, would like to reinforce Tom’s comments and, indeed, add from its MD’s own personal experience of the gruelling inception of the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 in Scotland (the “Act”).

Commentators have and will continue to suggest improvements. But what this author would like to see are two main changes: first, a template training module accessible online for free, published by the Scottish government; and, second, the existence of a licensing board that heads up all the other licensing boards in Scotland which provides a real leadership role and which should, hopefully, stop major differences existing between, among other cities and towns, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

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YouBlawG

August 3, 2010 General Legal

As WardblawG rockets through the 15,000 hit barrier after just 5 weeks, generating more than £100 in Google Adsense revenue, it is with pleasure that I recommend the webhost I use.

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