Intellectual property
Trade marks in the EU, the UK, the US and Ukraine, rights to code and content from the team and contractors, licence agreements and royalties, an IP company inside the group. So that the brand and the product belong to the company you sell, not to the people who once worked in it.
Four strands of the practice
Rights to the product
Code, design, content, data — from whoever created it to the company.
Trade marks
Registration where you sell and protection where you are copied.
IP in the structure
A separate IP company, intra-group licences, preferential regimes.
Contracts and enforcement
Licences, SaaS agreements, protection from copying.
The tasks clients came to us with
Who owns the model: moving IP from the team and contractors into the holding
Assignment of the code, model weights and datasets to a Cypriot IP company before the round; the investor’s IP due diligence came back clean.
A SaaS trade mark in the EU and the UK after a refusal over a similar mark
Clearance found a conflict; we changed the sign and the class, filed at EUIPO and UKIPO, and agreed coexistence with the owner of the similar mark.
Game rights in a Cypriot IP company with a licence to Costa Rica
The studio’s games assigned to a Cypriot company under the IP Box regime; a licence to the Costa Rican company that supplies the software to high-risk jurisdictions, with royalties set by transfer pricing.
Does the company own code a sole trader wrote without a contract?
By default, no — the rights stay with the developer. An assignment agreement is needed, ideally with retroactive effect for what was already created.
One EU trade mark or separate national ones?
An EU trade mark (EUIPO) covers all 27 countries in one filing. Separate national marks are needed for the UK, Switzerland, Ukraine and others outside the EU.
How long does trade mark registration take?
EU: 4–6 months without oppositions; UK: 3–4; US: 8–12; Ukraine: 12–18 (expedited 6–8).
Why a separate IP company?
It shields the brand and the code from operational risk, allows selling or licensing IP separately from the business, and in Cyprus adds the IP Box regime for royalty income.
What we have written about intellectual property
Who Owns the Code Your Contractor Wrote?
Who owns code a contractor wrote? Usually the contractor. In the United States, the United Kingdom and most of continental […]
Read articleProtecting your brand before it is worth copying
The cheapest time to protect a brand is before anyone wants to copy it. Once you have traction, the same […]
Read articleBrand, code or content not yet assigned to the company?
Tell us who created what and where you sell — we will say what to formalise first and where to register.
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