Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to strengthen protections available to registered owners, in regards to registered intellectual property, who say that a transfer was made without their authority.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) follows robust, proportionate processes to securely process 20K annual requests to record the transfer of ownership of IP rights in the register. These processes are reviewed regularly to reflect changing risk threats. The IPO is mid-way through a major transformation programme which will further improve validation processes by introducing an authenticated user account for all transactions. The recent consultation on the UK Designs system included proposals to extend the IPO’s power to resolve disputes over ownership of patents and trade marks to registered designs where that power is currently reserved for the courts.