NIPC News

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Photo Homelka Source Wikipedia Creative Commons Licence Jane Lambert The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has recently published  Business incubators and accelerators: the national picture , a research paper for the Department   written by Jonathan Bone, Olivia Allen and Christopher Haley of NESTA  and a national directory of business incubators and accelerators . The authors have identified 205 incubators and 163 accelerators in the UK supporting around 3,450 and 3,660 businesses a year respectively. Incubators are to be found throughout the UK but the regions with the highest proportion to the number of businesses are to be found in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Over half of all accelerators are in London though the highest concentration of accelerators to the number of businesses is to be found in Scotland. As I specialize in advising and acting f...

Downing College, Cambridge Photo Cactusback Jane Lambert Earlier this week I mentioned Juris Conferences LLC's  Eleventh Annual Investment Treaty Arbitration Conference – Technology, IP and Investor-State Arbitration at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Washington DC on 25 April 2017. I suggested that it was particularly timely in view of the final award in Eli Lilly & Co. v Canada 16 March 2017 which I discussed in the Falling to BITs: the Eli Lilly and Philip Morris Cases   8 April 2017 NIPC Law. I canvassed support for a similar conference on that topic in England and received one positive reply through Linkedin. The next day I received an invitation from the organizers of the Cambridge IP Law Summer School  to speak on the subject at this year's summer school at Downing College, Cambridge between 14 and 18 Aug 2017. This should be a splendid occasion.  The agenda looks fascinating. Some of the country's leading practitioners in IP la...

Much of the work that I did between 1980 and 2010 was to advise and act for small and medium enterprises from the North of England in claims for copyright, design right and trade mark infringement, breach of confidence and passing off. In many of those cases, a party sought an interim injunction and there was a fierce battle either on motions or Chancery interlocutory applications day or on the hearing of the motion or application for order. The parties usually lost interest in the case after the injunction was granted or refused. Rarely did a case go to trial and there was hardly ever an account or an inquiry. Sometimes money changed hands to settle a case but it rarely exceeded a few thousand pounds. Nowadays, most of those cases would fall within the jurisdiction of IPEC ("the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court"). IPEC was established on 1 Oct 2013 as a specialist list within the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice for intellectual property claims ...

Falling to BITs: the Eli Lilly and Philip Morris Cases NIPC Law  8 April 2017 Do the awards in Philip Morris v Australia and Eli Lilly v Canada mean that IP owners can't claim compensation from foreign governments if those governments fail to enforce their IP laws? Probably not, because nothing in those cases affects the principle that an investor that suffers expropriation of his IP rights can recover compensation for such expropriation .  More IP Yorkshire 10 April 2018 I was one of the speakers at CIPA's York meeting at the Principal Hotel. The others were Louise Edwards of Mazars, David Bloom of Safeguard IP and Kalim Yasseen of the IPO. Tony Rollins chaired the meeting. I spoke about litigation after 28 March 2017 when the EU treaties will cease to apply and considered the litigation framework we are likely to find then. Louise discussed changes to patent box relief in the Finance Act 2016 and the Finance Bill. David talked about all the new products in IP...

Jane Lambert When you key in the name of a business or one of its products or services into the address of a modern browser like Chrome the chances are that it will take you to where you want to go. Increasingly frequently, however. such an exercise will lead you to a landing page with sponsored links and searches including links to products or services of the business you are trying to reach. Occasionally, it will even lead to a spoof site that looks and feels like a genuine site but if a user tries to order goods or services through it or simply leaves an email address all sorts of annoying things can happen of which serial spamming is probably the least to worry about. The reason why internet users are waylaid in this way is that it is very cheap and easy to register a domain name that is the same or similar to a business name or trade mark . Now registering a domain name that is the same as, or similar to, someone else's trade mark or business name without justif...