NIPC News

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