Why Bother with IP?



Upon seeing the above presentation one of my Yorkshire clients sent me the following rant:
"Hello Jane,
I have just finished watching your Enforcing IPR talk.
Very impressive.
The UK law is so dysfunctional and financially prohibitive — serving only the financial elite.
I have to say, having listened to it, it reinforces what I have been saying to you for some time ...
Why bother with IPR?
I mean, why bother with protecting IPR if it is just not within financial reach to defend it?
ADR could be the beneficiary of such prohibitive costs, but not really.

For example, if one entity is more financially endowed than the other it actually is a strategy to threaten the other side with the court system, if only because they know it will bankrupt the other side.
The courts no longer represent fairness, or right over wrong.
The UK law is so dysfunctional and financially prohibitive — serving only the financial elite.
I feel quite depressed to be honest!
Kind regards"
There's a lot of truth in what my client said and I gave that talk before the cost of issuing a claim form for an injunction and unspecified damages soared by 421%.

Has anybody got any words of comfort?

Comments

  1. Lawrence12 March 2015 at 13:21

    Please don’t lose faith.

    My wife runs a small film production company and at the outset she took the decision to protect the name “Red Beetle Films” with a registered trade mark. Not much point in building up a brand to have someone else step in and take the name.

    Recently she was alarmed to discover that despite this protection someone did just that.

    But with a carefully crafted letter, thanks Jane, she was able to convince the infringing party to take down the website and cease using the registered mark. Something she would have found very difficult to do without trade mark protection. The costs...the price of a recorded delivery.

    ReplyDelete

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