English rugby club Saracens’ relegation from Premiership Rugby for breaches of the salary cap is the big news in the world of sports law this year. Premiership Rugby’s £7m salary cap was breached by Saracens for three consecutive seasons and was fined £5.3m and docked...
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Bittersweet Symphony IP dispute resolved
The dispute that first piqued my interest in intellectual property law was between The Rolling Stones and The Verve over the song Bittersweet Symphony in the late 1990s. Richard Ashcroft from The Verve, sampled a few seconds from a song by The Rolling Stones to make...
So You Think You Can Patent Your Invention?
You've come up with a great new idea and believe you're the first person in the world to have that idea. As you start planning world domination, you consider whether you can patent your invention. Patents protect new inventions and give the owner a 20-year head-start...
Who owns the Roger Federer RF monogram trade mark?
While you channel hop between the FIFA World Cup and the tennis you may have noticed that Roger Federer is no longer resplendent in Nike apparel at Wimbledon this year and is now sponsored by the Japanese brand Uniqlo (he still wears Nike shoes though). We were very...
How Intellectual Property Rights are Human Rights
In Part One of this series of articles we introduced the concept of cultural appropriation and provided an explanation of why it sits uncomfortably with most of us. In Part Two we discussed the power dynamics at play and whether that power-balance has been struck in...
UCT GSB Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship launch exciting free webinar
The UCT GSB Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship has partnered with the Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship at NYU School of Law to bring you the three part 'Legal Practice for Impact Investing' webinar for free. The goal of this...
COPYRIGHT IN TATTOOS | A PRICKLY LEGAL QUESTION
Would it ever occur to you that a third party might be able to claim rights in your skin? In the case of art that has been inked into your skin, namely tattoo art, that may well be the case. A tattoo is an artistic work. If it is original and reduced to a material...
IP team in Sandton win “Best Picture” in global competition
Adams & Adams' recently entered the NBCUniversal Global Counsel Meeting and Photo Contest with the above photo and came away with "Best Picture". The competition challenged all of NBCUniversal's international legal teams to enter a photo into one of four...
Power dynamics and IP laws | Is the balance fairly struck by current IP legislation?
Part one of this series by Myriam Christmann was titled The Thorny Issue of Cultural Appropriation and served as an introduction to the topic in general and introduced the idea that the remedy to widespread cultural appropriation could be achieved through...
The Thorny Issue of Cultural Appropriation
In the South African context, we are regularly confronted by examples of what is labelled as "cultural appropriation". What is cultural appropriation and where is the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation? In this guest post (the first in a...
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