Recently there has been a flurry of reports recording Jaguar Range Rover’s anger at Chinese car maker Landwind. Landwind had launched its X7 model at the Guangzhou motor show. The X7, priced at £14,000, is remarkably similar in design to Land Rover’s £40,000 Evoque.
This morning, Waterfront partner Matthew Harris was interviewed about this story on the BBC World Service. The recording of that interview is here.
Matthew and his team of intellectual property solicitors have acted both for non-Chinese clients with counterfeiting problems in China, as well as for Chinese companies involved in intellectual property disputes in the English Courts. He also appeared before the European Court of Justice on behalf of the International Trade Mark Association in the landmark Nokia v HMRC case involving counterfeit goods in transit through the EU.
The current legal framework in the UK does not allow copying of copyright-protected material for training generative AI models, except where it is carried out with permission of the copyright owner or done in a research or study context and for purely non-commercial purposes.
This matter deals with the Claimant’s (‘TVIS’) allegation of infringement and misrepresentation in relation to its “VETSURE” trade mark by the Defendant (‘Howserv’s’) “PETSURE” trade mark, used for pet insurance. In the first instance decision, the claim was dismissed due to the marks being highly descriptive and “not…