Martin Noble

Practice Areas

Martin focuses on giving pragmatic and commercial legal advice to businesses and takes the time to get to know them well. Alongside his years of experience advising on a broad range of commercial matters, Martin has a particular focus on intellectual property.

Martin works with a diverse range of commercial clients, providing valued input as a trusted advisor; often asked to give a view rather than a list of options. Martin’s practice covers the technology, manufacturing, retail, education and energy sectors.

Martin’s expertise covers the full range of IP rights: patents, trade marks, designs and copyright. This also includes the protection of goodwill and business and individual reputation. He has helped clients bring and defend cases in the UK courts, UK Intellectual Property Office as well as the Company Names Tribunal and using Nominet’s dispute resolution service. He also has experience of applying for and resisting applications for interim injunctions, where urgent advice is needed. His approach is practical and solution driven; for example, using mediation to reach a negotiated settlement without the need to go to court and where the settlement terms can include outcomes that wouldn’t be achievable in court.

Martin also supports clients and colleagues with transactions that involve IP rights, such as sharing IP through collaboration and licensing arrangements (often with multiple parties involved and in different jurisdictions). This also includes carrying out careful due diligence when buying and selling assets where the IP plays a key role.

Education

Work Highlights

In 2023 Martin advised THJ Systems, owned by software developer Andy Mitchell, in a copyright infringement case in the Court of Appeal. Martin led the team at Freeths who took on the case at short notice following the High Court judgment that failed to award an injunction in Mitchell’s favour. The defendants also attempted to overturn the judge’s finding on the subsistence of copyright, which was rejected by the Court of Appeal. It found that whilst the level of creativity was low, Mitchell had still exercised enough of his own intellectual creation in devising how his risk and price charts looked in his options trading software. Freeths instructed Richard Davis KC.

THJ Systems Limited & 1 Or v Daniel Sheridan & 1 Or [2023] EWCA Civ 1354

In 2023, Martin led the Freeths' team that won a hard-fought intellectual property case on behalf of Moviebox Megastores (International) and Oriental Star Agencies, who were targeted with malicious copyright claims against their YouTube channels . The judge (His Honour Judge Rawlings, sitting in the Birmingham Business & Property Courts) ruled that none of the evidence given to the High Court by the renowned Pakistani singer, Akram Rahi was his honest recollection of events. The March judgment followed a 9-day trial in December last year, some two years after proceedings were first issued.

Moviebox Megastores (International) Limited & 2 Ors v Mohammad Akram Rahi & 2 Ors [2023] EWHC 501 (Ch)