Colin Manning

Bakker is a vendor of plants that operates online and by mail order.  The company annoyed me some years ago by sharing my details with third parties without my permission.  People who buy plants by mail order are quite an attractive demographic and so it's a nice little sideline for the company.  I ended up getting a lot of junk mail as a direct result of this and I eventually traced it back to Bakker.  I was in the market for some plants today and so I e-mailed to the company just to make sure that their practices had since improved.  The reply I got was not conclusive enough to make me part with my money. While there I noticed some very nice clematis that go by the name of So Many®.  I was struck by the registered trade mark symbol.  It is unlikely that such a trade mark would be registered in Ireland since it is merely descriptive.  It is actually an offence in Ireland to use this symbol for a mark that is not registered under Secti...

This infographic from the WIPO has some classics from the misinformation tool kit. It wants to show the increase in Domain Name cases in 2016 and the relative sizes of the industry sectors they came from. But by increasing both the height and width of shapes used to represent them, the differences are exaggerated. This graphic tries to show that the number of cases has increased by 10% and the height of the shaded square behind is indeed 10% taller than the unshaded one in front.  But the width has also been increased by 10%.  This is deceptive because the area of the shaded square is 21% greater than the unshaded one.  A more accurate representation would look like this: The same error is made in the breakdown by country, but it is especially egregious in the case of France. This attempts to illustrate the 38.3% increase in cases from France.  But an increase of 38.3% in both the height and width of a square results in an increase in area ...

Irish Free State Registered Trade Mark No. 1 The first registered trade mark in force in Ireland was the UK's Trade Mark No. 1 for Bass Ale. However, following independence in 1922 Ireland put in place its own intellectual property regime. The Industrial and Commercial Property (Protection) Act 1927 established a trade mark register for Ireland.   Deanta I nEireann is Irish for Made in Ireland . A trade mark that merely designates the country of origin would not be registrable today.