United Kingdom: Licensing & Syndication

Expanding into international markets requires more than product development and marketing strategy. Many businesses overlook critical trade mark protection, risking expensive rebranding, legal disputes, and delayed market entry when their brand names conflict with existing registrations or carry unintended meanings abroad. Understanding territorial trade mark rights and implementing proactive filing strategies can prevent these costly mistakes before they derail your global expansion plans.

For many years, counterfeits were viewed as a problem primarily affecting luxury brands. Typically associated with fake designer handbags sold in street markets, enforcement strategies focused on identifying and dismantling relatively limited networks of infringers.

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.

Sony's leaked 2014 agreement with Marvel reveals strict contractual obligations requiring regular Spider-Man content production to retain IP rights, demonstrating the strategic power of performance-based licensing terms. The document exposes how Marvel maintained creative control and exclusivity windows despite selling the film rights, offering insights into high-stakes intellectual property negotiations in the entertainment industry.

Crafting the scope of protection for your patent or design right relies on striking the right balance between two factors: breadth and validity. You will want to make the right as broad as possible, to capture any possible infringement and minimise the room available for someone to work around your right.

Standard-essential patent disputes reveal a fundamental tension between territorial patent rights and global technology markets. While patents are enforced nationally, the standards they protect operate across borders, triggering parallel proceedings in multiple jurisdictions. FRAND arbitration offers a potentially coherent alternative by allowing parties to place international SEP portfolios before a single specialist tribunal, though questions of consent, validity, competition law and enforceability compl

Lewis Silkin Partner Cliff Fluet explores the legal and commercial foundations of music catalogue acquisitions in a two-part podcast discussion.

Intellectual property strategy is evolving from a background legal function into a critical leadership priority as intangible assets now represent over 90 percent of S&P 500 company value. Drawing on insights from IP leaders at Atlassian and Uncommon...

The Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre of the Unified Patent Court has launched its Case Management System, offering parties a new confidential and expedited pathway for resolving patent disputes across Europe and beyond.