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Cornbury Park is a large country estate in Oxfordshire which holds events and activities, as well as selling forestry products such as wood and venison. In summer 2024 they reviewed their trade mark portfolio to identify areas where the coverage needed to be brought up to date - always a good idea - and asked Downing IP to put in the necessary new applications. One of these applications was for the name CORNBURY PARK under the classification of festivals and events.
An objection to this application was raised by the organiser of Cornbury Music Festival, an event that he had started at Cornbury Park when he was a tenant there. We had helped the Estate resolve a dispute with him in 2013, which allowed him to continue to use the name Cornbury Music Festival. He now complained saying the Estate couldn’t register Cornbury Park for festivals, as he thought that was too close to Cornbury Music Festival and in breach of the 2013 agreement.
This objection resulted in a series of communications with the Trade Marks Registry. We decided to write a long narrative defence, rather than just writing a short one that just disagreed with the objection (known among IP lawyers as the “Baldrick defence” – deny everything!).
The narrative explained that this objection wasn’t as simple as it might appear on the surface, that it was a continuation of a dispute that was resolved in 2013 and that the opposition itself was a breach of the 2013 agreement. We also pointed out that Cornbury Park is mentioned in the Domesday Book published in 1086, meaning that we could prove that the Cornbury Park estate had the earlier right to the name by 900 years!
The Trade Marks Registry invited the opponent to set out their evidence to support their opposition and address the issues we had raised, and the opponent decided that was the time to concede.
UK law does give the right to the mark to the first user, but only if they can show that they have used it for long enough (and on enough of a scale) to establish a goodwill in the mark, so that people associate it with them rather than with others. So it’s important to preserve any external verification of your history that you can. I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance to show use of a name as far back as 1086, though…
