Mark works across all areas of commercial law, information technology (IT) law, intellectual property (IP) law, on-line commerce law and media law.
Some of Mark's more well-known clients include Groupon, RTL Group S.A., Elstree Film Studios, Sanyo, mysupermarket.co.uk, Retailcorp Brands LLC, Maxell, The Gulf Marketing Group, Playboy UK, Imagination Technologies Plc, GOOP.com (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the BBC.
Mark appears regularly on BBC1 (usually providing advice on-screen to BBC Watchdog) and also on Sky News as a legal commentator. He also likes blogging and writing books, which are available at all good bookshops!
Mark has extensive experience in advising clients on all manner of commercial matters (such as business planning and solutions, franchising, distribution, agency and marketing) through branding and intellectual property exploitation and licensing, to advice and documentation regarding hardware and software issues (such as development, licensing, maintenance and distribution, SaaS and cloud, Internet transactional solutioning, B2B, B2C and B2G electronic commerce, outsourcing, facilities management, procurement, IT policies, data protection (privacy) and freedom of information issues).
He is also experienced in dealing with software disputes and IT litigation. The increasingly extensive media side of his practice relates primarily to publishing (both real world and digital content), to games and gaming platforms (and particularly new transmedia technologies), advising companies about their advertising onscreen, online and in print and managing their public communications strategies generally (dealing with the OFT and ASA in the process) - and also a smattering of television, film and music exploitation.
Tamiz v Google Inc, Court of Appeal Payam Tamiz, a former Conservative Party candidate, sued Google Inc for an article that had been published about him on Google’s blogging platform. The article had been written in April 2011 and Tamiz wrote to Google on 29 June 2011 to complain. Google wrote to the bloggers on… Learn more
OFT says surcharge ban should be for all businesses Under recent proposals published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), businesses will be banned from including excessive payment surcharges in some business-to-consumer (B2C) contracts. That would mean that a business would not be able to charge a fee to process debit or credit… Learn more
Procter & Gamble v Svenska, Court of Appeal P&G supplied products to S. The contract provided for prices stipulated in euros, with payment to be made in pounds. There was no mention in the contract itself of any particular exchange rate. However, a document appended to the contract showed P&G’s manufacturing budgets and had an… Learn more
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published a consultation on OFT and Trading Standards powers for breaches of consumer laws. The consultation proposes giving the OFT and Trading Standards more power to take action against businesses that are in breach. The consultation suggests that a business should have to contact all customers affected… Learn more
Purely Creative v Office of Fair Trading, European Court of Justice The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that, where a customer is told that he has won or will win a prize in a prize promotion, the consumer cannot be made to pay any cost to find out if he has won a… Learn more
Prudential has been fined £50,000 for confusing two different customers who had the same name, over a three year period. The continuing mistake, despite having been told by each of the customers, led to significantly amounts of money being transferred out of one person’s pension pot to another pension service provider. Since 2010, the Information… Learn more
The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) has released guidance which says that businesses that run sales promotions should state any “significant conditions” clearly for consumers to decide whether or not to participate. CAP said that businesses that failed to make those significant conditions clear risked being in breach of the CAP Code (the code of… Learn more
Virgin Media distributed leaflets to people’s homes to give information about fibre optic cables that it was installing. The small print of the leaflet said that certain “individual premises” may be unable to connect to fibre optic services. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received a complaint that the leaflet was misleading. The ASA ruled that… Learn more
Ofcom received a complaint about advertisements on Channel 4, in which viewers were asked to provide tweets in relation to a film trailer and then those tweets were broadcast. The complaint related to whether the advertisement was clearly paid advertising or editorial content. Under the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, paid advertising must be readily recognisable and… Learn more
Crocs Europe BV v Anderson (trading as Spectrum Agencies), Court of Appeal Spectrum Agencies acted as CE’s UK agent. Spectrum’s employees posted some light-hearted comments on a website that customers saw, which poked fun at CE’s poor delivery record. CE terminated the agency agreement for disparagement of the products and an alleged repudiatory breach. The… Learn more