Author: Shireen Smith
Shireen Smith is an intellectual property lawyer whose company Azrights International focuses on brand protection, trade marks and copyright. In 2020 she set up the Brand Tuned podcast, and wrote her third book, Brand Tuned, the new rules of branding, strategy and intellectual property. Having trained in marketing and refined her ideas about brand creation she recently created the Brand Tuned Accreditation Program to teach designers, marketers, lawyers, business advisers and founders how to create distinctive brands using IP strategically. Email shireen@azrights.com. Twitter @ShireenSmith or @Azrights or @Brand_tuned.
The copyright status of AI-generated works
As AI platforms like Midjourney, or Dall-E2 are widely adopted the question, that is increasingly being asked is about the copyright position. It’s possible to create striking artistic images, music, poems and the like using Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms so people naturally wonder who owns the rights in the output? What are the risks of using the output […]
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Building your brand with social media
Constantly working on branding and IP projects means that I’m always coming up with new ideas on what I can offer clients to help them get more from my service. One example of this is my newest product and forthcoming book, provisionally called Brand Tuned – How to Create an Inimitable Brand to Win Business […]
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The business case for remote working
The decision to change the Azrights business model and just retain a meeting room wasn’t one I took lightly. With distant memories of Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer putting an end to remote working at the company back in 2013 I was unsure what the latest thinking on remote working was when I took the plunge in 2017 to […]
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Why intellectual property matters to your practice
In the previous issue of the Newsletter, Jordan Furlong highlighted how artificial intelligence and expert systems are being deployed in law firms, and will transform the legal industry. One implication of this is that law firms will be “marketing themselves as enterprises whose value and identities are independent of their lawyers”. If you’re minded to […]
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The intellectual property revolution
Despite the UK Government commissioning the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth in 2010 to ensure the UK has an IP framework best suited to supporting innovation and promoting economic growth in the digital age, there is still a marked lack of awareness in the business community about intellectual property and what it means. […]
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Bidding on competitors’ trade marks in AdWords
Should you bid on a competitor’s trade mark in AdWords? This is a simple question, but not one that has a simple answer. The High Court ruled in 2013 that you should not, as doing so would amount to a trade mark infringement. The case before the court involved Marks & Spencer and Interflora. M&S […]
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Copyright in website images
As simple as it is to find images online, one could be forgiven for thinking it is just as easy to know which images may be used. Unfortunately, the complexities of copyright law and the limited awareness of its rules can make the process of finding and using images a potential minefield for businesses. No […]
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Should lawyers give free advice to attract clients?
I made friends with an entrepreneur recently who had looked into trade marking her business name. She has not yet proceeded with any of the firms she contacted. So I was curious to find out who she had approached and how much my competitors were charging. None of this turned out to be particularly surprising […]
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Reputation monitoring and brand promotion
When Bing Crosby sang “You’ve got to accentuate the positive/and eliminate the negative” back in 1944, he probably wasn’t thinking about the internet and promoting business reputation. But at its simplest, those two ideas are the underlying principles behind managing your online reputation, and moreover, they’re intrinsically linked. You can either be proactive in promoting […]
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Domaining is big business
There is a tendency to label anyone who is in the business of making money out of domain names a cybersquatter, and in the process to regard them as guilty of fast practice verging on the fraudulent. But is it appropriate to regard the growing body of entrepreneurs, known as “domainers”, whose livelihood turns on […]
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