{"id":790,"date":"2026-08-18T11:30:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T11:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.athla.co.uk\/insights\/?p=790"},"modified":"2026-08-18T09:31:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:31:30","slug":"whats-the-value-of-copyright-if-you-dont-defend-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.athla.co.uk\/insights\/whats-the-value-of-copyright-if-you-dont-defend-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the value of copyright if you don’t defend it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shein v Temu, and what it means for anyone whose business is built on IP.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Last week we were valuing bins. This week, we’re looking at valuing something rather more sensible: a copyright. Except, as it turns out, that’s not straightforward either. A recent High Court ruling against Shein provides a good backdrop.<\/p>\n

Shein sued Temu, accusing it of \u201cindustrial-scale\u201d copyright infringement \u2013 letting merchants flog clothes using photos lifted straight from Shein\u2019s own website. Exhibit A was a \u201cStrawberry Nightdress,\u201d delisted by Shein for underperforming, that later turned up on Temu with the exact same photography. Shein lost. Mrs Justice Bacon found Temu hadn\u2019t authorised the infringement and had no reason to think the photos breached anyone\u2019s copyright. Temu, for good measure, won a counterclaim over takedown notices it says were wrongly issued against it. Even Shein\u2019s own case wobbled along the way: the judge noted its position on who actually owned the copyright had \u201cchanged significantly\u201d as the trial went on, leaving her with, in her words, submissions of \u201cquite extraordinary complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to run a fast-fashion empire to find a lesson in that. You just need to own something that someone else might copy.<\/p>\n

Why we, at Athla, care about any of this<\/strong><\/p>\n

Copyright sounds like a lawyer\u2019s problem, not a valuer\u2019s one. But increasingly it\u2019s both, because so much of what a company is worth now lives in its intangibles rather than its assets. Ocean Tomo, which has tracked this for decades, reckons intangibles now make up something like 90\u201392% of the S&P 500\u2019s total value, up from 17% in 1975. The ONS puts UK business investment in intangibles at \u00a3244.7bn in 2023 \u2013 some \u00a385bn more than was spent on plant, machinery and buildings. The stuff that used to sit outside the balance sheet is now rather a lot of the balance sheet.<\/p>\n

How much of that value sits in copyright specifically depends entirely on what the business does. A fabric or homeware brand whose whole pitch is \u201cyou can\u2019t get this print anywhere else\u201d is, in effect, charging a copyright premium on every sale (a UK court agreed as much back in 2020, ruling that a jacquard \u201cwave\u201d fabric design was protectable as a work of artistic craftsmanship, in a dispute between a fabric supplier and Edinburgh Woollen Mill). A haulage firm holds copyright too \u2013 in its marketing brochure, say \u2013 but nobody is paying extra for the privilege of that brochure.<\/p>\n

What happens if you never bother enforcing it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nothing dramatic, at first. That\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n

First, copying invites more copying. Once it\u2019s obvious nobody is going to chase you for lifting a design or a set of product photos, why would anyone stop? The EU\u2019s own IP office reckons counterfeiting and design piracy cost the EU clothing sector something like \u20ac12bn a year in lost sales \u2013 5.2% of the sector\u2019s turnover \u2013 and around 160,000 jobs. That\u2019s an EU figure rather than a UK one, but the direction of travel is the same wherever you\u2019re standing.<\/p>\n

Second, sitting on your hands for long enough can genuinely weaken your legal position, not just your commercial one. English courts have entertained the argument that a rights holder who knowingly lets infringement carry on, without ever objecting, can end up being unable to do anything about it later. A spare-parts maker tried exactly that defence against Dyson in the early 2000s \u2013 arguing Dyson\u2019s inaction should stop it suing \u2013 and lost, because the judge found no evidence Dyson had actually known about and encouraged the copying at a senior level within the business. Dyson\u2019s case survived because the facts simply weren\u2019t there for the other side. A business that really has said and done nothing for years might not be so fortunate.<\/p>\n

Third \u2013 and this is really Shein\u2019s cautionary tale \u2013 even having a case doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019ll win it. Courts pick infringement claims apart in forensic detail, and a case that\u2019s been thrown together, or where your own story keeps shifting, can fail expensively, complete with a costs bill and somebody else\u2019s counterclaim attached. None of which is an argument for doing nothing. It\u2019s an argument for keeping the paper trail: registration where it exists, dated files, licences, and an actual track record of chasing infringers \u2013 so you\u2019re not trying to build that evidence from scratch on the day it finally matters.<\/p>\n

Where this bites, from where we sit<\/strong><\/p>\n

We see the consequences play out in three predictable places:<\/p>\n