"IP scammers face record financial liability" is the happy title of a communication received by this Kat from his friends at the UK Intellectual Property Office. Their message reads, in relevant part, as follows: 10 November 2015
Company scamming IPO customers found liable for trade mark infringement and passing off.
A prolific and persistent scammer, responsible for deliberately scamming Intellectual Property Office (IPO) customers, was today found liable for trade mark infringement and passing off and ordered to pay £500,000 plus legal costs.
A company trading as ‘Intellectual Property Agency Ltd (IPA)’ [referred to by the court in its judgment as IPAL; incorporated in the Seychelles with a registered office address in Mahé, Seychelles, IPAL also gave a London address in Broadgate Tower, Primrose Street, EC2, plus a forwarding address in Barcelona and an address in Brussels] and the director Mr Harri Mattias Jonasson [who lives in Stockholm, Sweden] were found to have deliberately set out to deceive intellectual property owners by issuing scam renewal notices. By giving the impression that IPA was the IPO, or connected with it, IPA was able to persuade owners of trade marks and patents to engage it to renew those rights at a cost of up to 6 times the official renewal fees.
The judgment handed down by the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) provides the IPO with the maximum financial award possible from this court. ...
Initially IPA offered to negotiate and mediate, but ultimately they were unwilling to provide all the legal undertakings the IPO required. IPA instead filed a defence at the IPEC early in December 2014. The judgment today follows a hearing that took place at the IPEC on 29 September.
The IPO is working to educate its customers about the danger posed by scammers such IPA by issuing explicit warnings to users of the IPO naming the organisations concerned. Warning messages have also been placed on the IPO web site and other similar international IP offices such as OHIM and the European Patent Office.
Customer feedback has shown an overall reduction in scam renewal notices. In 2014, 262 people told the IPO that they had received such notices compared to 848 in 2013 [no, says Merpel, this only means that fewer people have told the IPO, not that the number of notices received has been reduced. Maybe more sensible souls are ignoring them or throwing them away rather than paying up, and don't therefore feel so incensed that they want to complain to the IPO].
During 2015, the total number of customer complaints about scam renewals as of the end of October was 224. The judgment of IPEC is therefore an important step in the continuing fight to stop the scammers.
More information is available on the Action Fraud web site.
The ruling in question is
Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks & Another v Intellectual Property Agency Ltd & Another [2015] EWHC 3256 (IPEC), a decision of the gentle, affable Judge Richard Hacon. The learned judge observed towards the end of his judgment:
"IPAL received a total of £1,334,234 from rightholders who responded to its Reminder form and paid out £227,724 to the IPO to renew their rights. That translates into a gross profit of £1,106,510".
Since £500,000 is that maximum award that the IPEC can make, it seems to Merpel that Mr Jonasson -- who did not appear in these proceedings and was not represented -- did rather better out of it than the IPO did, assuming that £1,106,510 minus £500,000 = £606,510
[that's around US$ 917K or euro 855K at today's rates]. Or has she missed something? No injunction was sought.
