United Kingdom: Copyright

An intellectual property lawyer helps businesses protect, register, commercialise and enforce their ideas, brands, products and creative assets. Good advice works in two directions: it helps a business stay on the right side of existing rights and avoid attracting claims, while also shaping its own portfolio so it becomes defensible, valuable and enforceable.

As AI voice cloning technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, the Save Our Voices Now campaign calls for statutory rights allowing individuals to own and control their voice as intellectual property. This article examines whether existing UK law sufficiently protects one of our most personal and recognisable attributes, exploring copyright, trade marks, passing off, and the practical steps individuals and businesses can take.

Discover how famous musicians' estates were shaped by their estate planning decisions—or lack thereof. From Amy Winehouse and Prince dying intestate to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky protecting their legacies through carefully crafted wills, these cases reveal the critical importance of formalizing your wishes to ensure your legacy is preserved according to your intentions.

Finally, the court considered the case of PL Travers Will Trust v HMRC [2014] SFTD 265, which concerned the tax treatment of royalty payments under the will of PL Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series. This had found that part of the receipts from the author’s copyrights had been income but only in relation to a specific period in which the trustees had been responsible for the exploitation of the copyright. This was not the case here.

The High Court of England & Wales has granted an unusually broad injunction in favour of Peppa Pig's owners after finding that the animated children's series Wolfoo infringed copyright in Peppa Pig sound recordings. Expert analysis identified matching audio clips across a representative sample of approximately 30,000 Wolfoo videos, leading to international injunctive relief requiring removal of infringing content and prohibiting future uploads across multiple jurisdictions.

Whether you're a rights holder trying to protect your pricing and distribution networks from parallel imports and the second-hand market, or a business that resells, repackages or parallel imports genuine third-party goods, you need to understand IP exhaustion.

Explore the legal implications of AI deployment by public authorities, including the Metropolitan Police's facial recognition technology case, and examine critical intellectual property challenges facing AI developers and users in this comprehensive podcast discussion.

The General Court of the European Union upheld Decathlon's registered EU design for its EASYBREATH full-face snorkelling mask against a technical function challenge, while the UK High Court found Chiaro's Elvie breast pump design had narrow infringement scope after excluding technical features. These contrasting outcomes reveal how the exclusion for designs dictated solely by technical function can dramatically affect protection scope, even for products designed to fit the human body.

The European Union has introduced groundbreaking changes to its design registration system, expanding beyond traditional static images to include animated and dynamic representations. These innovations offer fashion designers unprecedented flexibility in protecting clothing designs with intricate details, complex structures, and transformable features that were previously difficult to capture through conventional methods.