NIPC News

Standard YouTube Licence Jane Lambert Although the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on long-planned celebrations of World Intellectual Property Day including those that had been announced by M-SParc (the Menai Science Park ) in North Wales, nothing could have done more to ram home the importance of the day and its theme of innovation for a green future , Before the pandemic, there was a temptation for our species to regard itself as somehow immune from environmental catastrophe, to concentrate on economic growth regardless of the impact on the atmosphere and water supplies and to postpone decisions on climate change until well into the future.  Well, COVID-19 shows that it can't.  The pandemic, which is thought to have originated in the so-called wet market in Wuhan, is as much an environmental calamity as the Winter floods in England or the fires in Australia. Just as it is technology that is helping humanity to respond to COVID-19 in the search for dia...

Jane Lambert If your business has been forced to close if your staff are furloughed. if you are a furloughed employee or even if you have lost your job one as a result of this ****ing virus, one of the few positive things you can do during this lockdown is to train.  And if you are thinking of launching new products, starting a new business or looking for a new job one of the most useful things you can learn is intellectual property . Starting next Tuesday at 14:00 London time, I shall give an introductory talk on English and Welsh patent law which, in keeping with academic tradition, I shall call Patents 101.  This talk will last about 90 minutes and is aimed primarily at entrepreneurs, business owners and managers but should also be useful for solicitors and barristers who specialize in fields other than intellectual property and perhaps even associates and trainees who are about to work in their firms' IP departments. The talk will cover the following topi...

Addicted04 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Jane Lambert The most striking slide of Francis Gurry 's  Briefing for Member States and Other Stakeholders   of the World Intellectual Property Organization  which he presented on 7 April 2020 is #16,  China surpassed the U.S. as the top source of international patent applications in 2019.  Last year China made 58,890 international patent applications compared to 57,849 from the USA and 52,660 from Japan. According to the same slide, the USA made more patent applications than any other country in 2009.  China lay a long way behind the USA, Japan and Germany with roughly the same number of applications as South Korea and France. The UK came in #7 with 5,786 international patent applications in 2019 if anyone is interested. That is less than 10% of the Chinese figure. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.  I was at a domain ...

Author Rbreidbrown   Licence CC BY-SA 4.0 Jane Lambert Less than two months after its decisions in the DABUS cases  which I blogged in Artificial Intelligence - The DABUS Decisions   19 Feb 2020 NIPC Law, the Receiving Section of the European Patent Office has published a press release announcing that it has accepted a patent application for an improved method of rodent presentation. The invention was developed at the Institiut National des Ḗtudes Rongeuses at Zimmerbach in Alsace.  The specification states that cats have a predilection for delivering mice and other small mammals to their keepers (possibly as a gesture of affection) but conventional methods of delivery, namely in the feline's jaws present quality control challenges for the recipients.  Sometimes the specimen is still alive which causes recipients of a nervous disposition to scream and climb on furniture as soon as it is released.  Alternatively, the specimen m...