The case of the missing assets

“Take care of your intellectual property” - that’s the message emerging from a survey published by the UK Patent Office in June 2006 which found that over 70% of British businesses are unaware of the legal position when doing deals involving copyright.

There are no reliable rules about ownership, the case law is inconsistent, and the rules vary for different intellectual property rights. Recent court case have helped illustrate this point.

The Doc Marten logo case
This case related to R Griggs Group, owners of the world famous Doc Marten brand. R Griggs commissioned another company to design a Doc Marten/Air Wair logo. The contract did not state who owned the logo, and each company made its own different assumptions.

The two companies ended up in dispute about who owned the logo. The dispute went to all the way to the Court of Appeal, which said that R Griggs was entitled to full ownership of the logo. A brief paragraph in the contract dealing with ownership would have saved both companies thousands of pounds in legal fees.

So is the position clear now?
Unfortunately, the ruling in R Griggs won’t be applied across the board. A recent High Court case illustrates this. In this case, a company called Clearsprings Management Limited paid a company called Business Link Limited to develop some software. The contract did not say who owned the software, an omission which proved costly and time consuming when the companies fell out. The High Court ruled that Clearsprings only had a very limited licence to use the software and did not own it outright. A failure to agree ownership at the outset had proved very expensive for both companies.

IMPACT comment: avoid the dispute
The practical point here is that if the companies had dealt with ownership of the copyright in their contracts, the disputes would not have arisen and the companies would have saved a lot of time and money.

It is in the interests of businesses paying for designs, logos, software and other types of intellectual property, and also those providing the intellectual property to ensure that the contract deals with ownership at the outset.