Market report: intellectual property
Zoe James talks to some of the City’s leading IP partners about how in-house counsel can help their companies navigate the new challenges in brand protection
The task of safeguarding and enforcing intellectual property rights was always challenging but the irrepressible rise of social media over the last decade and political shifts like Brexit have added significant new layers of complication.
Social media has become a force to be reckoned with since erupting onto the scene in the early 2000s. With nearly five billion social media users worldwide in 2023 it has never been as easy as it is now for brands to access wider markets far beyond where they are based, with new trends able to develop (and fade) extremely fast. But these opportunities – combined with mounting public scrutiny of social media – raise implications for the methodology of IP protection and enforcement, as well as the way in which a brand maintains its distinctive identity.
