High Court: Intellectual Property Enterprise Court judgments, 2025

Joint authorship of a literary work requires collaboration, authorship, contribution and non-distinctness under section 10(1) of the Copyright Designs and…

A contract for the creation and supply of technical drawings may be established orally from the parties’ communications and conduct. A party alleging an…

A descriptive trade mark may retain distinctive character where a significant proportion of the relevant public recognises it as indicating commercial origin.…

Summary judgment is appropriate only where the claimant or defendant has no real prospect of success and there is no other compelling reason for a trial. The…

For trade mark infringement under section 10(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1994, likelihood of confusion is assessed globally through the eyes of the average…

Copyright in a simple artistic design may subsist where the work reflects the author’s intellectual creation and results from free and creative choices. A low…

For inventive step, the skilled person is ordinarily identified using the practical-interest formulation in Catnic. Where the claimed invention solves a…

Copyright infringement of an artistic work is assessed qualitatively. The question is whether the allegedly copied material contains elements expressing the…

A company dissolved with intellectual property assets passes those assets bona vacantia to the Crown. A third party cannot validly renew the rights without the…

Where an application is abandoned before its costs can properly be assessed, the court may reserve the costs decision until trial. This is particularly…

In trade mark infringement and passing-off proceedings, the court must assess the parties’ actual use, the relevant date, and the pleaded case with precision.…

For a patent claim requiring two adjustments to be stepless, both identified adjustments must satisfy that requirement where the claim links them to the…

Witness evidence should set out facts within the witness’s knowledge. Commentary on an opponent’s documents, design features and correspondence is ordinarily…

Unregistered design right protects the physical shape or configuration of a whole or part of an article, not an abstract design concept, construction method…

For assessing inventive step, the person skilled in the art must be identified by reference to the established field in which the technical problem was located…

For validity under Trade Marks Act 1994 sections 1(1), 3(1) and 47(1), the clarity and precision of a figurative mark are assessed as at registration from the…

In construing a patent claim, the court gives the words their natural meaning in the context of the specification, while allowing only such technical tolerance…

For indirect patent infringement under section 60(2) of the Patents Act 1977, supplied means need not embody the inventive concept or constitute the whole…

Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. A television or comedy-show format may in principle qualify as a dramatic work, but only…