Naked Law

Calling all brand owners

An anouncement has been made by the Community trade mark office (OHIM) of plans to dramatically reduce the official costs involved in filing a trade mark application.  This means that the amount it will cost to protect your name or logo by a European Community trade mark (or CTM) will be much more appealing to smaller businesses. (Although the fees will still be significantly higher than the official fees for filing a UK trade mark application at the UK IPO, which is currently £300 for 3 classes.)

The fees for filing a CTM application (on-line) at the moment, to cover 3 classes of goods or services, are 1600 Euros, and the aim is to lower this figure to 1000 Euros per application.  This is due to a whopping 300 million Euro surplus that OHIM is trying to shed, and in doing so is giving back to the people who use its service.

Shiny new chrome?

By way of follow-up to one of my previous posts on Google's terms and conditions, Google are in the news again, but this time in relation to the ts and cs which apply to its new Web-browser entitled Chrome. 

The original terms and conditions apparently gave Google rights to an all singing worldwide perpetual licence to effectively reproduce and do anything else with any Content displayed on or through its Services.  This would have arguably covered any documents created through use of Chrome which could have been extremely wide.  The current ts and cs state that users will retain all rights in their Content and Google do not acquire any rights at all.

The interesting thing about this news story is that the excuse was that this was just a 'drafting error' resulting from the fact that Google aim to use consistent wording across all of their terms and conditions to make things simple for users (see blog post from Matt Cutts which includes a quote from Google Senior Product counsel Rebecca Ward).  It seems likely that public pressure may have given rise to this about-turn.

Google ahoy!

Yesterday it was reported in The Times that Google is toying with the idea of creating floating data centres that are powered in part by wave power, as a radical way of cutting costs. A patent application has been filed in the USA for the idea (presumably with the intention of stopping others from following suit), though the company admits that it files patent applications for a variety of inventions, not all of which are subsequently pursued.

Powering and cooling data centres is a big problem, and on the face of it seems like a clever solution. However, there is some suggestion that wave power alone, based on our current technology, could not power a large data centre and the set-up and maintenance costs are not going to be low.

In terms of avoiding property taxes, rules and regulations as suggested by The Times, there has already been some speculation that this won't wash either, if a fellow blogger at The Guardian is to be believed.  Currently the barges are only intended to be anchored seven miles offshore, and according to the UN (or at least Wikipedia), they'd need to be at least 12 nautical miles from the mean lower water mark around the coast to be in international waters (and this extends to 200 miles around some countries). It looks like Google may need to do some more thinking before this idea sails ...