Cherrie Stewart, Chartered Trade Mark Attorney and Director of Ansons, has contributed a number insightful articles to CITMA Review in the past few months.
One covered the on the current situation of Intellectual Property in Northern Ireland. With the Northern Irish Protocol now in place following the implementation of Brexit, the implications for IP have become ever more complex.
Another covered the process of purchasing IP rights from the Crown, which has changed somewhat in the post -Brexit world, as EUTMs are no longer available for purchase from the Crown.
Cherrie is now part of the CITMA Review council and will be contributing further articles throughout the year and we look forward to sharing them with you.
We share an excerpt of one of Cherrie’s articles below along with a links for you to access both the articles.
The outcome of the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum created a unique problem for Northern Ireland (NI) – one that required a novel solution.
NI is the only part of the UK that has a land border with the EU. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which helped bring an end to the Troubles in NI, stipulated that there was to be no hard border on the island of Ireland. The UK’s decision to leave the EU introduced a conflict here, since this requirement clashed with the EU’s need to ensure the integrity of its single market for goods by having proper checks on its borders.
The tension between these diametrically opposed requirements resulted in the agreement of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland (the Protocol), which, in its opening statements, “acknowledges the need for this Protocol to be implemented so as to maintain the necessary conditions for continued North-South co-operation, including for possible new arrangements in accordance with the 1998 Agreement”.
This article was first published in the June 2021 issue of CITMA Review, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (CITMA). For more information on CITMA, please visit citma.org.uk . The full article can be accessed here.
The second article can be accessed here, as published in the January 2022 issue of the CITMA Review, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (CITMA).