Hands pressing a brass seal onto a certificate on a wooden desk, with red and brown ribbons beside it – trade mark registration.

Once your trade mark is registered, how safe is it? For its first twelve months, less safe than most brand owners assume – the Registrar of Trade Marks holds a power...

Appraiser seen from behind writing in a ledger beside an old hardcover book in a bright library workroom.

What happens when intellectual property built into your products turns out to belong to someone else? This week supplied three expensive answers. Each involved one of the world’s most powerful companies...

Brass chess knight on a dark reflective surface over a faint glowing world-map grid, shallow focus.

Over the past two decades, US firm value flipped from mostly tangible to over 90% intangible — and the rulebook for defending those intangibles quietly rewrote itself underneath everyone. A recent...

Close-up of a partly assembled watch movement with brass gears and tweezers on a dark wooden workbench in warm light.

What actually decides an IP dispute — the strength of your rights, or the machinery around them? This past week delivered three very different answers to that question, and each one...

Brass balance scales on a dark desk, one pan full of gold coins, the other nearly empty but level.

Most IP disputes don’t end in a clean win. They end in a split — you carry some grounds, lose others, and then discover the scoreboard the court actually cares about...

Clear unlabelled spirit bottle on terracotta earth with a sunlit coastal vineyard blurred behind it.

If your product’s value lives in where it comes from — a region, a method, a 450-year tradition — the hardest question in your IP strategy is whether the law will...

Open glass vault door in a modern room with light and glowing particles flowing out toward a window. (108 characters)

The most valuable lesson in intellectual property this week wasn’t a single ruling — it was a pattern. Across a landmark licensing deal, a patent that collapsed over one character, and...

Glowing digital padlock on a dark fibre-optic network, with some light pathways severed and others reconnecting around it.

If you hold copyright in music, film, software or any content that pirates love, a court order blocking the offending site is one of the most effective tools you have —...

Engineer walking away with a glowing document of patent drawings, leaving a blue-lit laser clean room behind.

A former engineer leaves, starts a company, and files a patent. Months later the original employer discovers the application describes technology that looks remarkably like a project the engineer worked on...