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Bona vacantia -- a quick query

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

Bona vacantia, as every Latin-speaking reader of this weblog knows, are goods that have, through no fault of their own, become ownerless. In the United Kingdom the ownership of bona vacantia passes to the Crown and there are presumably so many bits of ownerless property floating around that the government has set up a special office to deal with them: the Bona Vacantia Division of the Treasury Solicitor's Department. It's not clear how much the Bona Vacantia Division has to do with intellectual property, though. The site has a click-through to domain name auctions, but when you click through all you get is this.

Anyway, a somewhat perplexed friend of the IPKat has asked him if the Bona Vacantia Division automatically becomes the owner of registered trade marks where the owner has ceased to exist and has no successor. If so, is it possible to buy trade marks from the Division and how does one go about it. This Kat hasn't a clue and wonders whether any of his readers has any current or recent experiences of acquiring intellectual property rights from the Bona Vacantia Division that can be shared with readers of this blog. Please help if you can!

Merpel says, "And I thought bona vacantia" was the Latin for a nice holiday ...

Abandoned cats here

Full post as published by IPKat on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).