Intellectual Property
Intellectual property law has been one of our key focal areas since our firm was founded. Our partner Dr. Arthur Waldenberger was in-house counsel for a publishers association for many years and, for many years, a member of the Board for Intellectual Property of the German Bar Association (DAV).
For many of our clients, the effective protection of their specific know-how is a priority. We manage the portfolios of trade marks of numerous clients and assure their protection. We safeguard and defend design patents and ward off attacks on company names or Internet domains. Together with a group of experienced patent attorneys, we file for and defend industrial property rights (such as patents, utility models). We have attained particular expertise in copyright through our long-standing legal support of publishers, software firms and music companies.
We offer legal advice on the design of marketing concepts to prevent conflicts with protected trade marks. Our attorneys draft trademark, design patent and patent licensing agreements as well as copyright-related contracts of all types, e.g. software development contracts, publishing contracts, or agreements on the creation of databases.
Some of the cases we handled in the past include:
- Registration, monitoring and defense of trademarks, design patents, companies, titles and Internet domains for numerous companies, including the automotive industry, in energy consultancy, financial services, software production, food production, nanotechnology, medical products, online companies, passenger transportation, and publishing
- Contracts on the protection and licensing of know-how, such as in the machine tool manufacture or in information and nanotechnology
- Research and development agreements, for example in the fields of solar energy and human cell research
- Filing and defense of utility models and patents (in cooperation with our affiliated patent attorneys)
- Multi-year complex cancellation proceedings before the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Alicante) on behalf of a Swiss online firm
- Successful defense of a series of trade marks of a passenger transportation company against a listed trade company
- Successful defense of the trademark rights of a financial services provider against a major publisher in multi-year proceedings
- Successful defense of a publisher in a five-year legal dispute on alleged unauthorized retrieval of data from databases
- Judicial enforcement of the rights of a medical product manufacturer against product piracy (copyright infringement), including claims for damages
- Judicial enforcement of the copyrights of a computer software manufacturer against a competitor
- Protection of trademarks and other signs of numerous energy suppliers