Posts

Showing posts from 2014

What an employee can and cannot do when no longer on your payroll

Image
Jane Lambert While an employee remains on your payroll he or she is bound by an implied obligation of good faith and fidelity to do his or her best for you. He or she is not allowed to discuss your affairs in public or work for a competitor. As Mr Justice Laddie said in Ocular Sciences Ltd v Aspect Vision Care Ltd (No.2)  [1997] RPC 289, [1996] EWHC Patents 1, (1997) 20(3) IPD 20022, that has nothing to do with the law of confidence or trade secrecy. However, the employee is not your slave. He or she is entitled to seek work elsewhere or even set himself or herself up in business in competition with you. If the employee leaves your employment he or she is likely to use skills, knowledge and experience gained in your employment. There is nothing wrong with that even if you have spent time and money training the employee. After all, you see nothing wring in recruiting someone who has been trained by somebody else do you. Nor is it disloyal of the employee to attend in

Brilliant Beckton

Image
In an email to the Intellectual Property Bar Association , our Chair Henry Carr QC reported that he and a party of other IP lawyers and patent attorneys visited 1000 Dockland Road, Royal Albert Dock, London E16 2QU last month. The reason for their visit is that the site has been identified as a possible venue for the London section of the central division of the Court of First Instance of the Unified Patent Court. The estate agents' particulars sound idyllic: "Fully accessible raised floor Suspended ceiling with 1.5m planning grid Cat 5 lighting Excellent natural light Views over Royal Albert Dock Four pipe fan coil air conditioning 7 underground car parking spaces and bicycle storage 3 passenger lifts Five-storey winter garden and building reception On site coffee shop, cafeteria and news agents."! Henry's note is also pretty encouraging: "1. The facility is, potentially, very good for a European Institution. The space is l

WIPO Panellists Meeting

Image
WIPO Head Office Photo Wikipedia Jane Lambert Last Wednesday I attended the annual domain name panellists' meeting at the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") 's head office in Geneva. The meeting normally takes place on the third Monday of October but this year it was postponed until December. The WIPO is one of five domain name dispute resolution service providers that have been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN")  for the resolution of disputes between trade mark owners and those who have registered domain names. The other service providers are the Arab Centre for Dispute Resolution , the  Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre , the Czech Arbitration Court Arbitration Centre for Internet Disputes  and the National Arbitration Forum . By a memorandum of understanding between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN dated 25 Nov 1998 the US government entrust

Bringing high quality advice and advocacy to those who need them most but can often afford them least

Image
Jane Lambert When I practised on my own account from the Media Centre in Huddersfield my strapline was "Bringing high quality advice and advocacy to those who need them most but can often afford them least."  Although I now have to charge more because I have much higher costs I try to do the same in London. It is now more necessary than ever because the Legal Services Consumer Panel wrote at page 5 of their report 2020 Legal Services How regulators should prepare for the future   November 2014: "The core challenge ahead is to extend access to justice to those currently excluded from the market because they cannot afford legal services. This need and other forces, including government policy, consumer empowerment, technology and the effects of liberalisation, will combine to result in less involvement by lawyers in many of the tasks that until now have made up their staple diet. Consumers will seek alternatives to lawyers or use them in differen

Intellectual Property Act 2014: Annual Report on Innovation and Growth: First Annual Report from the IPO

Image
Jane Lambert If there is one thing that the IPO is good at it is writing reports which is just as well as it was ranked 12th in 2012 in the the list of top 15 patent offices by number of patent applications which was the last year that the World Intellectual Property Office ("WIPO") published that particular league table (see page 17 of WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2012 ). No doubt it will slip still further after unitary patents become available because why would anyone want a monopoly of an invention for a small, crowded, offshore island which came within an ace of fragmentation last September when they can get a European patent for nearly the whole of the EU as though it were a single state? S.21 (1) of the Intellectual Property Act 2014 requires the Secretary of State before the end of the period of 6 months beginning with the end of each financial year to: "lay before Parliament a report setting out— (a) the Secretary of State’s opinion of the exten

Website Changes

Jane Lambert As you can see from the above video the Intellectual Property Office has moved to the Government portal .  The new address of the site is  https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office although you can get through to the new site if you key in http://www,ipo.gov.uk . The new site is not as pretty as the old site and it takes a bit of getting used to but everything that I need seems to be there. I use the site for the unofficial consolidations of The Patents Act 1977 , The Registered Designs Act 1949 , The Trade Marks Act 1994  and Parts I and II of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988  and The Patents Rules 2007  and The Trade Marks Rules 2008  and they all seem to be there. Harder to find are the Tribunal Practice Notices which you need whenever you go before a hearing officer. These have been archived with the old website.  So, too, have the patents , trade marks and some of the designs decisions . The Copyright Tribunal still

Forthcoming Presentations

Date Title Venue 26 Sept 2014 14:00 – 17:00 Making Sure you make Money from your Brands and Ideas and not other People Workshop and clinic with speakers from 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, Loven IP and the Intellectual Property Office CPD BSB and SRA Grantham College, Stonebridge Road, Grantham, NG31 9AP 29 Sept 2014 16:00 – 18:00 Intellectual Property Ac 2014 – What it means to you and your clients In-depth seminar led by Jane Lambert, CPD BSB and SRA QualitySolicitors Jackson & Canter, 88 Church Street, Liverpool, L1 3AY 15 Oct 2014 18:00 – 19:45 The Intellectual Property Act 2014 - What it means for you and your clients In-depth seminar led by Jane Lambert, CPD BSB and SRA Business and IP Centre. Central Library, Calverley Street, LS1 3AB

Grantham Science Festival - there is a practical side to science

Image
A putative descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree Jane Lambert Baroness Thatcher  may be Grantham's most famous (or, depending on your politics infamous) daughter but Sir Isaac Newton  was indisputably its greatest son. Although Thatcher was by no means in the same league as Newton she was also a scientist. To celebrate its scientific heritage and in particular Newton's theory of gravitation Grantham is holding a science and arts festival known as Gravity Fields between the 24 and 28 Sept 2014. There will be all everything from rocket science for 2 to 5 year olds to building quantum computers with Professor Danny Segal of Imperial College in the Science Festival  and Douglas Hollick's Goldberg Variations  to Chasing the Eclipse   a new ballet by Chantry Dance Company , the only professional dance company in Lincolnshire. Now science, the arts and technology are the hallmarks of civilization but people will only invest in t

An Introduction to Intellectual Property, Grantham, 26 Sept 2014

Event management for Making Sure you make Money from your Brands and Ideas and not other People powered by Eventbrite

Sponsoring the Performing Arts - the Legal Considerations

' Dream Dance' workshop from Rae Piper on Vimeo .  Jane Lambert As part of the Lincoln Inspired Festival 2014 , the Chantry Dance Company delivered a workshop in which the participants were guided in creating their own modern ballet piece based on the subject of dreams. The piece seen in the video was created by the dancers in just 2 hours! You can read all about it in "Chantry Dance Company's Sandman and Dream Dance"  10 May 2014 Terpsichore. As I noted in  Chantry Dance Summer School  2 Aug 2014 the company does great educational and outreach work bringing dance into prisons and care homes as well as theatres. Ballet Cymru does great work with Gloucester Dance (see  "'Stuck in the Mud' doesn't mean you're stuck"  25 June 2014 Terpsichore ). Valuable educational and outreach work is also done by Northern Ballet and Scottish Ballet. Much of this work depends on sponsorship by businesses and individuals and companies in the

How to keep out of court

Image
Lord Esher: "better have his patent infringed .... than have a dispute about a patent." Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert In Ungar v Sugg  (1899) 9 RPC 117 Lord Esher MR said: "A man had better have his patent infringed, or have anything happen to him in this world, short of losing all his family by influenza, than have a dispute about a patent. His patent is swallowed up, and he is ruined." Clearly, there has to be a better way and indeed there is but you have to think and plan ahead. The key to keeping out of court is to anticipate and defuse potential disputes before they arise. The best way to do that is to commission regular intellectual property audits from your lawyers or patent or trade mark attorneys. An IP audit identifies the intellectual assets that you use in your business - that is to say, your brands, designs, technology and works of art and literature (which includes computer software and databases, catalogues and users' manuals a

Reflections on the Intellectual Property Act 2014

Image
Jane Lambert The Intellectual Property Bill received royal assent on the 14 May, just over a year after it was introduced into the House of Lords and is now an Act . It is a very short statute consisting of 24 sections divided into Four Parts together with a Schedule. It enables the Secretary of State to implement the Council Agreement on the Unified Patent Court  and the Hague Agreement , expands the scope of the Intellectual Property patents opinion service and establishes an opinions service for designs and provides for appeals from hearing officers in designs matters to be heard by an Appointed Person as in trade marks. It also tidies up s.213 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Registered Designs Act 1949 and the Patents Act 1977.  For a detailed analysis of the legislation, see my article The Intellectual Property Bill 28 May 2013 NIPC Law and the presentation by Alex Roxycki and me. The Bill's only controversial provision was clause 13 whi

Happy World Intellectual Property Day

Image
National Media Museum, Bradford     Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert Tomorrow is World Intellectual Property Day . I wish all my readers a happy World Intellectual Property Day.   Folk may think that that is an odd greeting. But is it?  When someone is ill don't you wish him a speedy recovery? What is more likely to accelerate his recovery than the medicine or medical device that may have cost millions to develop.  The fruits of that investment are protected by the patents, trade marks and other rights that prevent competitors from taking advantage of the research and development work known collectively as "intellectual property".   Intellectual property is the glue that holds investment in branding, design, technology and creative works together.  So the greeting "Happy World Intellectual Property Day" is a kind of celebration of the world's advances in science, technology, the arts and literature. Every year there is a different th

New IP Clinics in Hendon and Bradford

Image
Jane Lambert Before the economic downturn I used to hold monthly IP clinics in  Barnsley, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Rotherham, York and the Wirral. These were very busy and I used to see between 20 and 30 entrepreneurs, inventors or other creative folk every month. A number of those persons succeeded and they created many new jobs. Glyde House Bradford When the downturn came, demand for those clinics disappeared almost overnight.  I do not know whether that was because banks were more reluctant to lend or because fewer people wanted to take the risk of setting up new businesses.  Only one clinic kept going throughout those years and that was the one at the Barnsley Business Innovation Centre on the second Tuesday of every month between 10:00 and 12:00. Middlesex University Now that the economy has started to pick up I have decided to revive my Bradford clinic at Glyde House on the third Thursday between 14:00 and 16:00 and launch a new one at