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