United Kingdom: Licensing & Syndication

As artificial intelligence transforms ingredient discovery across pharmaceuticals, food, and biotechnology, companies face a critical challenge: when multiple organizations contribute data, AI models, and expertise to create new molecules and insights, who controls the resulting intellectual property? The answer requires rethinking traditional IP frameworks to account for datasets, model improvements, and experimental knowledge that may prove more valuable than the initial products themselves.

For many medical technology companies, a patent is the natural starting point when considering intellectual property protection for a new product.

The emergence and continued progress of commercial launch services has transformed space into a compelling frontier for innovation. Yet, patent infringement occurring in orbit is not a run-of-the-mill IP enforcement issue and can be difficult to address directly. This raises an important question: why invest in patent protection for technologies intended to operate in space? The answer lies in understanding where patent rights can be enforced, but also how patents create commercial value beyond litigation.

For many businesses, the biggest threat to a future investment, acquisition or exit is not financial performance but whether they can clearly evidence ownership and control of the assets driving value. Increasingly, those assets are intellectual property, software, data and digital infrastructure, yet many organisations have far less clarity on ownership than leadership teams realise.

When Hasbro alleged that SConnect's Wolfoo animated series infringed Peppa Pig copyrights through unauthorized audio clips, the High Court granted summary judgment based on spectrographic evidence. The case reveals critical lessons about outsourcing liability, international copyright exposure, and the strategic advantages of early litigation decisions.

The Supreme Court has confirmed that English courts can determine whether licensing terms offered by patent pools for standard essential patents (SEPs) are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND), even when the pool operator made no FRAND commitment and owns no SEPs. This landmark decision in Tesla v InterDigital opens the door to judicial scrutiny of patent pool rates and raises important questions about how SEP owners and implementers navigate collective licensing arrangements.

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.

Before expanding, taking investment, franchising or licensing a business, it is essential to confirm that the brand is clear to use, properly owned and capable of protection in priority markets.

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust mRNA technology into the global spotlight, transforming decades of foundational research into commercially valuable vaccines almost overnight. This rapid commercialization, combined with enormous revenues and a complex web of overlapping patents, has triggered an unprecedented wave of intellectual property disputes that is reshaping how value is allocated across the biotechnology industry and determining who controls access to next-generation RNA-based medicines.