Skip to content

News archive

  • Screen shot of the official Tarantino NFTs website

    Tarantino’s controversial Pulp Fiction NFTs offer a glimpse of entertainment’s future

    When it was released in 1994, Pulp Fiction was lauded for its innovative breaking of the chronological order, its distinctive dialogue, and for break-out performances from Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Travolta. It was one of the movies that propelled the 1990s wave of indie cinema, and its writer-director Quentin Tarantino became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated auteurs.
    And it l

  • Image from Virgil Abloh's Instagram account

    “Cheat codes” for creativity: Designer Virgil Abloh leaves behind a provocative legacy


    The fashion world is mourning the passing of Virgil Abloh, the 41-year-old artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection, from cancer.
    He leaves behind a formidable legacy. When he began his tenure at Louis Vuitton in 2018, Abloh – the son of Ghanaian immigrants who had made their new home in the United States – became the first black man to take on the artistic direction of tha

  • Images from the Instagram accounts of Bayanda Khathini (left) and Tamaryn Green (right)

    Rip-off or not: A tale of two blue dresses

    African fashion designer Bayanda Khathini, who specialises in high-end traditional beaded wedding dresses, has sent a letter of demand to Sello Medupe, the owner of fashion label Scalo. The issue: Khathini believes that a dress Scalo designed for former Miss South Africa, Tamaryn Green, copies a dress designed by Khathini in 2019. 
    Khathini asserts that his unique aesthetic style is due to his

  • How to use PitchFeed

    How to use PitchFeed

    PitchMark deters the theft of your concepts, creations, proposals, business plans, music — basically, any ideas that you conceive and want to protect as your own when submitting these ideas for pitches to potential clients. Read more here about how the PitchMark Certificate helps you to do this.
    Your idea ownership gains another layer of protection when you opt to appear on PitchFeed. This sect

  • Image from official House of Gucci website

    Gucci protects its IP fiercely, but plays a different game for the IP of others

    With the movie House of Gucci opening this week, the Italian fashion house is in the spotlight for the passionate vendettas that occurred back when the company was a family-owned business. The current Gucci, however, is now owned by a French luxury-goods conglomerate, and it knows a good branding opportunity when it sees one. The company opened up its archives to the movie’s production team, and t

  • Image from Cultural Heritage Administration, Republic of Korea

    From paella to kimchi, countries are using IP benchmarks to protect beloved national dishes

    Everybody gets upset when their ideas get stolen, and if that idea happens to be a beloved national dish, then get ready for sparks to fly. Perhaps because food is intimately tied to notions of cultural identity, improper culinary appropriation – or the perception of it – tends to make people extremely salty and the ensuring furore extra spicy.

    Recently, the government of Valencia – the reg

  • How to use the PitchMark Certificate

    How to use the PitchMark Certificate

    All innovators want to benefit from their original ideas. To do so usually involves discussing or pitching the idea with others, in order to get funding, marketing, or feedback.

    Unfortunately, this opens up innovators to the risk of idea theft. Copyright protection mechanisms do exist, but they can be costly and cumbersome. Here’s where PitchMark can help.
    When innovators register thei

  • Images from Emily Ratajkowski's Instagram page

    By creating her own IP, model-turned-memoirist Emily Ratajkowski is taking control

    She shot to fame by appearing in the music video for the song “Blurred Lines”. Now, model-actress Emily Ratajkowski is also an author whose debut memoir, My Body, comes out this month.

    Her book arrives on the heels of an essay she wrote for New York magazine in 2020. Titled “Buying Myself Back”, the piece – which went viral – detailed several harrowing instances where she tried to gain con

  • Screenshot of the official Taylor Swift website

    How important is it to own your IP? Taylor Swift knows all too well

    We last wrote about pop star Taylor Swift’s decision to re-record her albums made under the Big Machine label here, and explained why this move was necessary for her goal of gaining the master rights to these re-recorded songs.
    Now, the second of these re-recorded albums, Red, is being released. And Swift is making the media rounds to reiterate exactly why she feels it’s important for artists t

  • Screenshot from M-sense Migräne's Twitter page

    Big Tech has an IP theft problem

    Whether or not one finds the idea of a metaverse exhilarating or creepy, Facebook has not been a company that inspires much affection for quite a while, thanks to its data privacy controversies. So when the company recently announced it was changing its name to Meta (inspired by the concept of the metaverse), the mocking memes were quick to proliferate.
    Among the many jokes made at Meta’s expe

  • Screenshot of Archewell website

    How royal couple Harry and Meghan upped their IP game

    With a musical, a movie and recent and upcoming seasons of the immensely popular series The Crown all featuring the late Princess Diana, the troubled life of the British icon is capturing the popular imagination once again.
    In the real world, her two sons are navigating life under the public spotlight in their own ways. Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, in particular, have carved out th

  • Images from the COP26 Instagram account

    With COP26 in progress, it’s time to look at the role of IP in sustainability

    It’s been called the world's best last chance to get the climate crisis under control, and it’s happening right now. This week, representatives from over 190 countries gather in Glasgow for the United Nations' 26th Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP26). Even the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeff Bezos and Ellie Goulding are expected, and esteemed figures

Show more