Disputes about copyright, trade marks or patents or domain names, all of which can be valuable business assets, can arise when other businesses:

If you have detected infringements of your IP, what is important is to protect your brand and reputation from being hijacked. Simply drawing the attention of the party infringing your rights may be sufficient to get them to stop. If not, you may be able to resolve the dispute by Alternative Dispute Resolution, rather than by taking court action – in fact, the courts will expect you to try to resolve matters before commencing court action.

On the other hand, if you are told in writing that you are infringing another person’s IP rights, then you need to seek legal advice quickly as you may need to stop what you are doing immediately.

We can advise you by assessing the strength of your case and then help you to try to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible.

‘Data protection’ often seems to be used as an excuse for not doing something, or not providing some information.

The Data Protection Act 1998 applies to a particular activity – processing personal data –rather than to particular people or organisations. This means that, if you collect or hold, or use, disclose, retain or destroy information about an identifiable living individual, you are likely to be processing personal data and you must comply with the provisions of the Act.

Businesses will hold personal data about their employees and customers. Whilst you may be exempt from the requirements to make notification of your activities to the Information Commissioner’s Office, you are still required to comply with the rest of the Act.

At BPK we understand that data protection and the implications of the Data Protection Act 1998 can be difficult to take in. Our specialist team can advise on: