Practice areas · Intellectual property
Trade marks, copyright, designs, and confidential information — registered where registration helps, and enforced when someone takes what is yours.
For most Barbadian businesses the intellectual property that matters is the name above the door, the material they publish, and the information they would not want a competitor to have. It is usually protectable, usually inexpensive to protect, and usually left unprotected until someone else registers it first.
We advise on what is worth registering, register it, and act when it is infringed — for local businesses, regional groups, and overseas owners protecting their marks in Barbados.
Availability searches, applications, and prosecution through the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office.
Advising on ownership, assignment, and the rights in written, visual, musical, and software works.
Protecting the appearance and form of a product where design is the commercial value.
Agreements permitting others to use your rights — franchise, distribution, and content licensing.
Cease and desist, proceedings, and remedies against infringement and passing off.
Non-disclosure agreements and employment terms that protect information registration cannot.
The most common and most expensive intellectual property mistake is trading under a name for years and registering it only when a dispute arises. By then someone may hold the registration, the name may be on signage, packaging, and a domain, and the cost of rebranding vastly exceeds what registration would have cost at the outset.
If you are naming a business, a product, or a service, a search and an application before launch is a small piece of work that protects everything built on that name afterwards.
Registering a company gives you the right to that company name on the register. It does not, by itself, give you the exclusive right to use that name as a brand, or stop a competitor using something confusingly similar. Those are different rights obtained in a different way, and the assumption that incorporation covers it is widespread and wrong.
Barbados