NIPC News

Jane Lambert I hope all my readers had a good Christmas and I wish them a happy and prosperous New Year, A hot topic for the New Year is likely to be the legal protection of inventions, artistic and literary works, designs and other intellectual assets that are created by machines.  Three of the papers of the Life Science IP Conference which was held at at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel on 26 and 27 Nov 2019 addressed the topic as did two of the papers at the International Copyright Law Conference  which was held in London a few days later.  Francis Gurry , the Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (the UN specialist agency for IP) discussed the subject in an interview entitled Intellectual property in a data-driven world   which appeared in the October issue of the WIPO Magazine. This is not a new subject.  I can remember articles and conference papers on the topic for as long as I have been at the Bar.   It was addressed by Parliament

Intellectual Property Office Crown copyright, Licence Intellectual Property Office Jane Lambert One of the recommendations of Prof. Hargreaves's review of intellectual property and growth  which was commissioned and largely implemented by the Coalition government in 2011 was that "The IPO should draw up plans to improve accessibility of the IP system to smaller companies who will benefit from it. This should involve access to lower cost providers of integrated IP legal and commercial advice." The Intellectual Property Office has tried to carry out that recommendation by developing support tools for use by academics, business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, professional advisors and other members of the public.  There is now a portal for those tools on the government's website at  https://www.ipo.gov.uk/ip-support/ . The portal looks like this: There are 9 colour coded icons: IP Equip IP Heakthcheck B2B Toolkit

Author Voytek Pavlik Public Domain Dedication   Source Wikipedia Cryptocurrency  Jane Lambert Financial technology ("FinTech") is one of the most rapidly growing technologies on the planet and one that the UK is ideally placed to develop for the reasons that Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, explained in his presentation  to the Deutsche Bundesbank G20 conference on “Digitising finance, financial inclusion and financial literacy” (see also his speech  on YouTube). I have written a number of articles on the topic which I have indexed in the "Further Reading" table of my FinTech Index page .  The latest of those articles is my note on the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce's  Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts   which I published on Saturday. The LegalTech Delivery Panel which presented the Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts has also posted a scaleup glossary  to its website together with an advent cal

Jane Lambert Before he began his distinguished career in the WIPO, Francis Gurry  was best known for a rather good book on the law of confidence .  It is now in its second edition having been updated and edited by Tanya Aplin, Lionel Bently, Phillip Johnson, and Simon Malynicz. Although the law of confidence can be used to prevent unauthorized use or disclosure of any kind of secret information, it is the legal mechanism by which trade secrets are protected in the United Kingdom.  It is probably the most widely used means of protecting investment in innovation and creativity in this and other common law countries. The law of confidence offers a number of advantages over patents and other registered rights.  It is free. It arises whenever information the use or disclosure of which would benefit the confidant or harm the confider is imparted in circumstances that give rise to an obligation of confidence. It cannot be revoked as a patent can and the obligation of confide

Jane Lambert The World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") published its World Intellectual Property Indicators 2018   on 16 Oct 2019.  In September 2019, the Intellectual Property Office published  Facts and figures: patent, trade mark, design and hearing data: 2018   for the UK. The headline figures that appear on page 7 of the WIPO report is that there were over 3.3 million patent applications in 2018 which is 5.2% above the figure for 2017. China accounted for 46.4% of those applications with over 1.5 million. That was an increase of 11.6% on the number of Chinese applications for the previous year. The USA was number 2 with 597, a 1.6% decline on the figure for the previous year.  Japan came a distant third with 313,567 applications. China accounted for more than half of the world's 14.3 million trade mark applications with 7.4 million applications. Again the USA came in second with 640,181 and Japan third with 512,156.  China also came top

Jan 2011 Jan 2013 Jan 2015 Jan 2017 Jan 2019 0 24K 48K 72K 96K Jane Lambert Something remarkable has happened to my NIPC Law blog.  Its readership has soared like a rocket. For the first time ever, it has received more than 100,000 hits in a single month. This is not entirely unexpected I have tried to publish a short post on something new every day whether a case note on a recent decision, an analysis of a new statute or some other important development.  Although I hope my articles will be useful to specialist lawyers and patent and trade mark attorneys I am aware that not every reader is an IP specialist.  Indeed, many are not lawyers at all. For non-specialists, I have posted information pages on copyright , patents , registered and unregistered  designs, trade marks and so on    These can be accessed from the home page  of the NIPC Law blog, clicking on the menu bar in the top left-hand corner (three short lines) and scrolling down. Readers will also notic

Jane Lambert It is often said that intellectual property is crucial to the efficient functioning of modern economies but there is much less research to support that assertion than might be supposed.  However, some valuable research on the topic has recently been undertaken by the  European Patent Office ("EPO")  and the  European Union Intellectual Property Office ("EUIPO") , In September 2013, those institutions published a joint report entitled  Intellectual property rights intensive industries: contribution to economic performance and employment in the European Union .  The EPO and EUIPO published an updated report in October 2016 and they have now published their third report. The report identifies 353 IP intensive industries in the EU which employ directly 63 million people and make work for another 21 million in businesses that supply those industries.  Those same industries generated output worth €6.6 trillion between 2014 and 201

Standard YouTube Licence Jane Lambert One of the topics that were discussed at the 14th session of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement was building respect for intellectual property.  On that topic we heard presentations by, and received handouts from, Rajiv Aggarwal of India, Hedvig Bengston of Norway, Maya Al'Azri of Oman,  Ray Augusto Meloni García of Peru and Liliana Vieru of Moldova. For our entertainment and education, the WIPO secretariat erected a little video lounge called the ACE cinema which showed anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting videos like "Knock off Nigel" which was one of the most amusing.  I particularly love the expression on Nigel's face as his girlfriend dumps the "watch that he found in the street" in his beer,  There were other "Knock off Nigel" videos including one from the office . Although the "Knock off Nigel" films were witty, not everybody liked them,  In  "Why I Hate the Knock off Nigel A

The WIPO © 2004 Jane Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement 14th Session 2 - 4 Sept 2019 The World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO")  is a specialist agency of the United Nations with 192 member states. Its mission is "to lead the development of a balanced and effective international IP system that enables innovation and creativity for the benefit of all." Its mandate, governing body and procedures are set out in the WIPO Convention  to which the British government is a party. One of the WIPO's services is alternative dispute resolution  through arbitration,   mediation  and domain name dispute resolution  and I have been one of its panellists since 2003.  Every year the domain name dispute resolution panellists are invited to Geneva for a day of continuing professional development training.  I have attended every session since 2005 (see Needled in Geneva   18 Oct 2005 NIPC Law).

Jane Lambert Earlier this year the World Intellectual Property Organization  published WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2018 .  This is a compendium   of statistics on worldwide patent, design and trade mark filings.  The headline figures are that there were 3.17 million patent applications around the world in 2017, as well as 1.78 million utility model applications, 12.39 million trade mark applications and 1.24 million applications for the registration of industrial designs.  The lion's share of those application cams from Asia with 97.1% of the world's utility model, 67.9% of its industrial design, 66.6% of its trade mark and 65.1% of its patent filings.  North America came second in patenting with 20.3% and Europe third with 11.2% but Europe was ahead of North America in trade mark, industrial design and utility model registrations.  Some 85.1% of the world's 3.17 million patent applications were filed with the world's top five patent offices. Ch

Lough Neagh ℗ 2019 Jane Elizabeth Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert If you were wondering what had happened to my blogs I am on holiday in Northern Ireland, Yesterday I took this photo from  Oxford Island , a nature reserve on the southern shore of Lough Neagh, a vast inland sea in the centre of Nothern Ireland. But I am keeping my eyes open and my wits about me so that I can report things that may be of interest to my readers such as the Catalyst Science Parks  in Belfast , Ballymena  and Derry-Londonderry . There are also a ccelerator and incubator programmes i n Nothern Ireland such as Ignite's in Belfast  as well as business angels  and private equity investors . Belfast Central Library used to be listed as a PatLib library but it is no longer on the current list  and there does not appear to be an IP clinic in the province but there are patent and trade mark attorneys who can be identified by searching the I PReg website. The Patents Act 19

Downing College Cambridge Jane Lambert Last week I was invited back to Cambridge by Knect365 to speak to the Cambridge IP Law Summer School  at Downing College. I was asked to repeat the talk on IP disputes and bilateral investment treaties that I gave to the 2017 summer school  and to mention the research on IP enforcement in the digital environment that Professor Frederick Mostert and I had carried out for the Advisory Committee on Enforcement of the WIPO (see Mostert and Lambert  Study on Intellectual Property Enforcement Measures, Especially Anti-piracy Measures in the Digital Environment – Executive Summary   and the full report) . I also chaired the final day's session on "Contentious IP". As in 2017, this year's course took place in Downing College's  Howard Building .  That building consists of a ground floor common room with a licensed bar and an auditorium on the floor above.  Morning coffee, afternoon tea and some lunches and

Author Basher Eyre ,  Licence CC BY-SA 2.0 ,  Source Wikipedia Rolls Building Jane Lambert A new guide to the practice and procedure of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ("IPEC")  was published yesterday and came into force immediately. It is intended to help users and potential users of the court by explaining how its procedures work and by providing guidelines where appropriate. Small Claims Track Business outside London An important announcement of the new guide is that from October 2019, there will be district judges in each of the six Business and Property Court centres outside London (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle) to hear matters in the IPEC small claims track . Appeals from decisions in the IPEC small claims track will be filed at the relevant appeal centre indicated in PD 52B . A judge of the multi-track will be made available to hear the appeal, either locally or in London, depending on the circumstan

Jane Lambert I am grateful to Mark Beer  for bringing the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts ("SIFoCC") and its Multilateral Memorandum on Enforcement   to my attention in a post on Linkedin.  Mark is now President of the International Association for Court Administration .  I first heard of him when he was Chief Executive of the English speaking common law courts in Dubai known as the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts which I first discussed in  DIFC Courts on   7 Jan 2011 JDSupra. SIFoCC was established at a meeting in London of judges of many of the world's commercial courts convened by Lord Thomas (former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales) in May 2017  (see History of SIFoCC ).  Its members include the Business and Property of Courts of England and Wales (see Jane Lambert Launch of a Judicial Superhighway 12 July 2017 IP Northwest), the Court of Session in Scotland, the High `Court of Northern Ireland, the US District C