VINCZE IP provides legal assistance in connection with every aspect of Intellectual Property law, including:
We support you at every stage in the life of your trademarks: prior-art and availability (clearance) searches, defining the filing strategy, filing and prosecuting registrations in France, the European Union and internationally, managing renewals and watching your marks. We also represent you in opposition, revocation and invalidity proceedings before the INPI and the EUIPO, as well as in negotiations with third parties.
We protect the aesthetic appearance of your creations — shapes, patterns, interfaces, packaging — through French, Community and international design registrations. We advise you on the most suitable protection strategy, combining design law with copyright, and, together with our partners, we defend your rights against infringement and unfair competition.
Together with our partner patent engineers, we advise innovative companies on protecting their inventions: patentability assessment, filing strategy in France and abroad, prosecution of grant proceedings and patent-portfolio management. We also handle the contractual aspects of patents, in particular licences, assignments and development agreements.
We assist you in registering, managing and defending your domain names, consistently with your trademark portfolio and your trade or company name. We set up watch services and bring out-of-court recovery proceedings in cases of cybersquatting.
Choosing a company name, trade name or sign commits your business for the long term. We check their availability against prior rights, secure their adoption and defend your distinctive signs against misappropriation and any likelihood of confusion.
We advise creators and companies on protecting their works — graphic creations, texts, photographs, software, websites — and on establishing proof of their rights. We draft and negotiate copyright assignment and exploitation agreements and act in cases of infringement or unauthorised use.
We design, draft and negotiate your trademark, patent, design and know-how licence agreements, in France and internationally. We ensure the economic balance of the contract, quality control, compliance with competition law and the protection of your rights throughout the contractual relationship.
Know-how and confidential information are strategic assets that are not covered by any industrial-property title. We help you identify them, protect them through appropriate contractual and organisational measures (non-disclosure agreements, trade-secret clauses) and leverage them within licences or technology transfers.
We defend your rights against the infringements they face: cease-and-desist letters, pre-litigation negotiations, opposition, invalidity and revocation proceedings before the INPI and the EUIPO, infringement seizures (saisies-contrefaçon) and court actions, working closely with partner litigators where representation before the courts requires it. Whenever possible, we favour negotiated amicable settlements that preserve your commercial interests.
Beyond industrial-property rights, we protect you against parasitic and unfair conduct by your competitors: imitation of your products or of your commercial identity, diversion of customers, disparagement. We build strategies combining, as appropriate, infringement actions and unfair-competition actions together with our partner lawyers.
We draft and negotiate all intellectual-property agreements: assignments, licences, coexistence agreements, franchise and distribution contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and research and development contracts. We also secure the intellectual-property aspects of your mergers and acquisitions and your due-diligence audits.