Legal News

Lifestyle Equities CV and another company v Sportsdirect. Com Retail Ltd and other companies [2025] EWHC 1417 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of this case? Since the TMA 1994 arrived, advisers have urged clients to record trade mark licences, yet that advice is often ignored. This High Court ruling returns the point to centre stage, offering sharper guidance on elements of the registration regime. At its core sits judicial discretion across the framework. The court firmly held that a non‑exclusive licensee cannot sue for infringement without the proprietor’s consent; however, the licence need not be recorded for the licensee’s losses to be taken into account during a damages enquiry. Registering the licence belatedly, including after proceedings have begun, can also be acceptable. Nonetheless, whether and how the court credits such timing sits squarely within its discretion. The trade‑off for such...

UPC Court of Appeal declines ECJ referral on costs deadline The UPC Court of Appeal has dismissed Expert e‑ Commerce Gmb H’s bid to involve the European Court of Justice in assessing whether the UPC’s time limits for claiming costs are excessively narrow. The application followed the German company’s failure to meet the cut-off to recover costs in proceedings against Seoul Viosys Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Seoul Semiconductor Co Ltd. The appellate judges concluded they cannot request the European Court of Justice to interpret the UPC Agreement. According to the ruling, that framework “forms part of international law” and does not constitute an EU regulation, directive or act. The court added that the same position applies to its Rules of Procedure. A request for a preliminary ruling must address the interpretation or validity of EU law, rather than construing national rules or matters of......

In this issue: Copyright & associated rights Designs Trade marks/passing off Patents General IP Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Copyright & associated rights Wine importer loses ‘battle of the bottles’ in copyright claim ( Martin v Bodegas San Huberto SA) UK importers take heed—the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has backed an artist’s claim that a label on wine bottles brought into and sold in the UK by a UK company infringed copyright in an original work and also amounted to passing off. The Argentinian supplier had commissioned a designer to craft an appropriate label, and the importer raised no questions about that choice. Of the three labels that formed the focus of the allegations, the court decided that one constituted a plainly substantial reproduction of the artist’s work—even though the copied element comprised only a very small segment of the original ( Infopaq...

UPC’s Court of Appeal declined Expert e- Commerce Gmb H’s bid to have the European Court of Justice opine on whether the UPC’s deadlines for claiming costs are unduly strict. The move followed the German company’s failure to meet the cut-off to recover expenses arising from litigation against Seoul Viosys Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Seoul Semiconductor Co Ltd. The appellate panel stated it has no authority to ask the European Court of Justice to construe the UPC agreement, which, it said, forms part of international law rather than an EU regulation, directive, or act. The court added that the same characterisation extends to its Rules of Procedure as well......

Martin and another company v Bodegas San Huberto SA and others [2025] EWHC 1827 ( IPEC) What are the practical implications of this case? While this case does not raise any new points of law, it serves as a clear warning to businesses and legal practitioners to stay alert to intellectual property risks around importation and distribution. Supply networks are often intricate, with legal and commercial factors at nearly every step. Packaging and labelling offer a prime illustration, particularly across food and drink, where market share battles are intense and traders know the value of eye-catching presentation. Yet in crowded markets, the push to attract consumers can unintentionally create intellectual property problems if a protected design is copied or a misleading link with another trader is suggested. The case highlights exposure for intermediaries, even if they only import and distribute and are unaware of any...

In this dispute, Deity Shoes holds EU design rights covering several shoe models. It alleged that Mundorama Confort and Stay Design had infringed those rights. Mundorama Confort and Stay Design filed counterclaims seeking invalidity, asserting the contested designs derive from pre-existing designs appearing in catalogues of Deity Shoes’ suppliers, differing only marginally due to customisation of elements such as the sole, laces, or buckles—features steered by fashion trends. Accordingly, they argued the designs do not stem from any ‘genuine design activity’, ‘intellectual effort’ or innovation. The matter reached the Court of Justice via a preliminary reference from the Juzgado de lo Mercantil No 1 de Alicante ( Commercial Court No 1, Alicante, Spain). The AG distilled the referring court’s questions into two points: does an EU design require a ‘genuine design activity’ or ‘intellectual effort’? do fashion trends restrict the...

In this issue: AI and IP Copyright & associated rights Trade marks/passing off Patents Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information AI and IP Generative AI in context of copyright—knowing your hypersurfaces from your stochastic parrots. Toby Headdon, of Bristows LLP, reviews the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Justice, Civil Liberties and Institutional Affairs’ study on Gen AI and the challenges it presents for copyright owners. The Parliament’s report is highly technical and uses dense terminology, which this article helpfully clarifies. See News Analysis: Generative AI in context of copyright—knowing your hypersurfaces from your stochastic parrots. Copyright & associated rights Foreign performers’ claims against the UK for failure to apply EU law on royalties potentially remain viable post- Brexit ( AFM and SAG- AFTRA v The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology). The High Court has refused applications for summary dismissal and strike out of...

Parallel trade of goods This principle, in effect, underpins the parallel movement of goods. Parallel trade describes the import and export of authentic goods that have already been lawfully placed on the market, where the IP owner’s rights are exhausted. Within the EU, the European Economic Area ( EEA) applies a regional exhaustion model. With limited exceptions, once goods are put on the EEA market—either by the IP owner or with the owner’s consent—those rights are spent; in practice, the owner cannot manage or oppose further dealings in those goods. The IP rights in goods first placed on the market in the UK have not been treated or recognised as exhausted in the EU since: the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020; the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020; and the UK is no longer a member of the...

On 14 August 2025, the UPC Court of First Instance held that Dreame International ( Hong Kong) Ltd and Eurep Gmb H must not sell devices in Spain that could infringe Dyson Technology Ltd’s patent. Eurep is a German business that supports Dreame in EU product safety compliance efforts. The court found Eurep to be an authorised representative and ‘indispensable’ to Dreame’s distribution of electronics overall, including in Spain. This allowed Eurep to function as an ‘anchor defendant’, enabling the UPC to target Dreame with sanctions, the ruling stated. Although Spain is not a party to the UPC Agreement, the Hamburg local division nonetheless chose to impose an injunction spanning Spain, relying upon Spanish law for support. The court noted that Spanish patent law permits injunctions ‘against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe patent rights’. This holds ‘even if the...

On 14 August 2025, Getty told a federal judge in Delaware it would discontinue its case in that venue and pursue the dispute in the Northern District of California, the forum British startup Stability AI had argued was the proper setting. On the same day, Getty lodged a fresh complaint in San Francisco’s federal court, asserting the startup had infringed its rights on “a staggering scale.” Getty had first brought proceedings in February 2023, alleging Stability copied millions of images from its online collection to help create Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator. To achieve this, Stability altered or removed copyright management data tied to the images, Getty claimed......

Accord Healthcare Ltd and other companies v The Regents of the University of California and another company [2025] EWCA Civ 936 What are the practical implications of this case? Three principal messages from the judgment are summarised below: First, in advancing an obviousness challenge, one must articulate the background that would prompt the notional skilled person or team to conclude that a given step is obvious. The claimant’s expert did not indicate that he approached the question on the footing that the skilled team, after reading the prior art, would be motivated to explore alternatives to it. The expert also failed to set out any objective that a medicinal chemist would be pursuing at any material time whatsoever......

Technological Aspects of Generative AI in the Context of Copyright The European Parliament’s Policy Department for Justice, Civil Liberties and Institutional Affairs has issued a briefing titled ‘ Technological Aspects of Generative AI in the Context of Copyright’. This technical note, presented in accessible terms, describes how Gen AI works via the idea of hypersurfaces. If that sounds baffling, the paper compares a hypersurface to a rubber sheet stretched across many dimensions, with each training point tugging slightly, producing a smooth yet intricate terrain that runs close to many original training data points. Gen AI is unlike traditional machine learning: rather than predicting a label or property from inputs (determinism), these models are trained to synthesise fresh outputs through probabilistic sampling across learnt distributions. This is not ‘human learning’ and does not amount to ‘understanding’. Instead, it is statistical...

Tradeinn Retail Services S. L. Case C‑76/24 What are the practical implications of this case? Under Article 10(3)(b) of Directive ( EU) 2015/2436, an unauthorised third party may not use a trade mark by offering or placing goods on the market, by holding stock for those ends under the sign, or by offering or providing services beneath it. The Court of Justice confirmed that storing goods bearing an infringing trade mark in one state constitutes an offence where the intention is to market those goods in the state in which the trade mark is registered. What was the background? PH owns two German trade marks, ED and a device, registered for, inter alia, ‘diving equipment, diving suits, diving gloves, diving masks and breathing apparatus for diving’. From Spain, Tradeinn Retail promoted diving accessories for sale on its website and via Amazon.de using PH’s trade marks. Items...

Trustees of AFM and SAG- AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund and others v The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology [2025] EWHC 1944 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of this case? This ruling may pave the way for substantial cross-border disputes in the music royalties arena. It brings several practical consequences: ongoing relevance of EU-derived substantive rights post- Brexit: the decision shows that claims for equitable remuneration grounded in EU standards can still be advanced, particularly where domestic law departed from those obligations (namely, Francovich damages). In this matter, UK law meant that a performer’s status as a US national yielded only a limited right to equitable remuneration (broadly aligned with protection in the US). By contrast, the EU stance is more generous representative proceedings: the court’s readiness to allow four performers (claimants 9–12) to act as...

Samsung Bioepis UK Ltd v Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc [2025] EWHC 1240 ( Pat) What are the practical implications of this case? This decision delivers a clear warning to life sciences patent practitioners: exactitude in sequence‑defined claims is critical. Although the therapeutic product aligned with the invention’s aim, the presence of a non‑functional 22‑amino acid leader in the claimed light chain—absent from the mature eculizumab antibody—proved determinative. Alignment between product and concept could not cure the defect. The High Court refused a purposive reading that would excise the leader sequence, holding the claim wording unequivocal and the patent both invalid and not infringed. The ruling highlights the narrow scope for interpretative latitude. The court treated the language of the claim as pivotal, keeping its focus on the words actually chosen. It emphasised that “consisting of” expresses a closed definition, and that scientific...

GEMA files model action to clarify AI providers' remuneration obligations in Europe. GEMA is the first collecting society worldwide to lodge a claim against a provider of generative AI systems for the unauthorised use of protected musical works. The case centres on the US company Open AI, operator of generative chatbot systems. GEMA alleges that Open AI reproduces protected song lyrics by German authors without having secured licences or paid those writers. The objective is to establish that Open AI systematically uses GEMA’s repertoire to train its systems. Open AI has emerged as the world’s leading provider in generative AI and now reports annual sales above U$2bn. In 2024, the company is targeting revenues of up to U$5bn. Its AI-assisted language system, the chatbot Chat GPT, was trained on copyright-protected texts, including lyrics from the repertoire of around 95,000 GEMA members. These authors have yet to...

In this issue: Trade marks/passing off General IP Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Trade marks/passing off Court of Appeal provides guidance on variant trade marks and revocation actions in easy Group cases (easy Group Ltd v Easy Live ( Services) Ltd; easy Group Ltd v Easyfundraising Ltd) Two Court of Appeal rulings, in easy Group Ltd v Easy Live ( Services) Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 946 and easy Group Ltd v Easyfundraising Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 1000, deliver welcome clarity on separate trade mark infringement claims first brought by easy Group Limited (easy Group) against Easy Live ( Services) Ltd and Easyfundraising Ltd (and others). At first instance, the judges arrived at divergent outcomes on the defendants’ counterclaims, which included assertions that easy Group’s stylised EASYLIFE mark had not been genuinely used and should be revoked for non-use. The Court of Appeal has, in...

A German music collecting society has filed a lawsuit against Suno AI for copyright infringement at the Munich Regional Court. GEMA, the organisation responsible for enforcing its members’ copyrights, alleges the generative AI system has exploited works under its remit, naming titles including ‘ Daddy Cool’ by Boney M and ‘ Forever Young’ by Alphaville, among other works under its administration and control. “ Our members’ songs are not cost-free input for the business models of generative AI providers,” said GEMA’s chief executive Tobias Holzmüller in a statement. Any individual or entity wishing to use these songs must secure a licence and pay fair remuneration to the authors. He added that GEMA has a licence model available, noting it would always take legal action against unlicensed use. The legal proceedings come as the role of collecting societies, also referred to as CMOs, has...

The Commission has unveiled a standard form that AI makers falling under the EU AI Act must use to set out the data fed into their systems. Yet the reach of one of its most contentious obligations is still not, as yet, defined. Under the EU AI Act, creators of general‑purpose models, including Open AI, Anthropic and Google, must release a ‘sufficiently detailed summary’ describing the training data that were used to train their models. What counts as ‘sufficiently detailed’ follows a compulsory template issued by the EU executive on 24 July 2025. Models are built on vast datasets, for which information is often scarce or incomplete in practice. The summary aims to help parties with a legitimate interest—such as data subjects and rights holders—assert their rights under EU law. But a fiercely disputed disclosure item in the...

Radmat Building Products Ltd stated before the High Court, in a July 2025 defence newly made public, that Aco Ahlmann SE & Co KG ought to be stripped of its exclusive rights to a roof-based drainage system capable of retaining water, contending that one of Radmat's then-available products could have led engineers to devise it. Ahlmann has lately claimed Radmat produced a drainage solution named ' Perma Quik 800' that trespasses on its invention. Radmat now maintains, the defence says, that one of its roofing systems disclosed crucial aspects of Ahlmann's concept before the competitor sought protection for it......