The issue of relinquishing copyright ownership in an original piece of writing, an artwork or a musical composition is a complex and delicate issue. Fortunately, South African law provides some guidelines as to what is morally fair for authors or creators of such works. The author of a work is typically the first owner
Trade mark protection is crucial for any brand owner, but it can sometimes create practical difficulties from a business perspective. When new trade mark applications are published by registries, information about a company or a brand owner’s new product or service is necessarily disclosed. As a result, brand owners often have to decide whether
Videotape, Escalator, Trampoline, Laundromat[1]. What do all of these words have in common? They were all once legally protectable trade marks which, due to the way in which they were used, have lost their distinctiveness and since become ‘generic’. But what does ‘generic’ mean? A generic trade mark is a word or phrase that
The Advertising and Regulatory Board (ARB) recently handed down a decision holding that the videos posted by comedians Skhumba Hlophe and Celeste Ntuli had breached the code on South African advertising. Hlophe and Ntuli uploaded videos on their Twitter accounts, promoting South Africa’s national lottery, Ithuba Holdings RF (Pty) Ltd (Ithuba). The videos were
In Thermos Hong Kong Limited v Doshi Ironmongers Limited (Civil Appeal (Application) E013 of 2021) [2022] KECA 544 (KLR), the Kenyan Court of Appeal had to determine whether a party had a second right to appeal an appellate decision from the High Court in relation to a trade mark dispute. To recap, this case was
Patents & Companies Registration Agency (PACRA) issued a public notice of 23 August 2022, announcing that effective from 1 September 2022, the Zambian Registry will only issue electronic trade mark registration certificates. PACRA advised that its decision to move away from hard copy (paper) trade mark certificates to electronic certificates, was made with the aim
Ambush marketing and the 2022 Rugby World Cup Sevens With the upcoming Rugby World Cup Sevens being hosted at the Cape Town Stadium (purpose built for the 2010 FIFA World Cup), one cannot help but think back to the FIFA World Cup and the ambush marketing tactics on display before and during the tournament.
A recent advertising parody has caused quite a stir at the watering hole, and left consumers questioning whether Hippo.co.za may have been out of line. The advert, which has already garnered over half a million views on YouTube alone, is a parody of OUTsurance’s “saver” advertisements that appears to spoof the original advertisements that featured Katlego
What are the boundaries when it comes to registering the name of a place, country, city or town as a trade mark? This is the question that the Grand Board of Appeal of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) is set to decide when it hears its first ever oral appeal in a
It has been just under a month since the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development released a directive warning that certain meat analogue products are in contravention of local regulations relating to the packaging and labelling of processed meat products in SA (Regulation 1283 of 2019) in that they bear product names
