NIPC News

Standard YouTube Licence Jane Lambert A time-honoured way of proving the existence of a document on a particular day is to place it in a sealed envelope and post it to oneself or a trusted third party.  The envelope would bear a postmark proving the date and place of posting of the envelope.  If the seal was intact and there was no obvious tampering with the envelope it would prove that the ideas expressed in the document existed on the date of posting.  Often it proved other things such as the originator of the idea or at least the author of the document. In the United States, the exercise was called a "poor man's patent" possibly because it could sometimes identify the person who was entitled to apply for a patent before the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (Public Law 112-29 26 Sept 2011) .  However, it was and is used here to prove the authorship of a copyright work or the originator of a trade secret.  The system of source code escrow is simply a...

Standard YouTube Licence  Jane Lambert Improvements in broadcasting and recording technologies in the 20th century created the need for new intellectual property rights known as rights in performances  to protect the revenues of actors, dancers, musicians. singers and other performers as well as those of their broadcasters and film and sound recording studios in the broadcasts and recordings of their work.  In the United Kingdom, the rights of such performers are protected by Part II of the  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 .  Performers who are UK nationals or residents enjoy similar rights in other countries by virtue of the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations of 26 Oct 1961("Rome Convention") . Developments in digital technology towards the end of the last century required a strengthening of those rights which resulted in the  WIPO Performances and Phonograms ...

Jane Lambert There has not been much IP training lately either for business owners and the general public or for lawyers, patent or trade mark attorneys or other IP professionals.  That could be a problem because as I said in IP Services during the Emergency   23 March 2020 NIPC Inventors Club and many times since IP has never been more important than it is now. On 21 April 2020, I tried to do something about it by delivering over the internet a talk on patents that I had given some years ago to an audience of solicitors and patent and trade mark attorneys at the offices of Morgan Cole (now Blake Morgan ) in Oxford.  This was part of a double act that I performed with the distinguished solicitor and author Peter Groves .   The training started at 14:00 and lasted till 17:00.   My contribution was an introduction to patent law and overview that lasted 90 minutes. The feedback that we received suggested that the talk had gone down v...