NIPC News

Dickson Poon School of Law Author Vladgrigore   Licence CC BY-SA 4.0   S ource Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Last November the University of St Andrews Law Society  invited me to return to my alma mater to judge a mooting competition.   I wrote about it in Learning the Law in St Andrews - Mooting   on 6 Nov 2024. Yesterday I was asked by the King's College London Bar and Mooting Society  to join a panel discussion on intellectual property practice.  As I had previously worked with  Professor Frederick Mostert  on a project for the World Intellectual Property Organization which I mentioned in Another Side of the WIPO   on   5 Sept 2019, I was delighted to return to King's College . On arriving at the college's porters' lodge I met my colleague, Mark Engelman,   He old me that he had also been invited to sit on the panel.  Shortly afterwards we were joined by officers of the Society who led us through the securi...

Jane Lambert  When I was called to the Bar our design law was relatively straightforward. Features of shape, configuration, pattern or ornament applied to an article by any industrial process or means with eye appeal that were new or original could be registered under the Registered Designs Act 1949 for 5 renewable periods of 5 years each up to a total of 25 years. Design drawings for manufactured products were artistic works within the meaning of s.3 (1) of the Copyright Act 1956 and so long as the drawing was original copyright protected the design for the life of the author of the drawing plus 50 years. All this came to an end on 1 Aug 1989 when the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 came into force.  The Act overhauled the Registered Designs Act 1949 and provided that it was "not an infringement of any copyright in a design document or model recording or embodying a design for anything other than an artistic work or a typeface to make an article to the design or t...

Diagram of the Turing test Author Juan Alberto Sánchez Margallo Licence CC BY 2.5   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Following the Court of Appeal's judgment in Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks v Emotional Perception AI Ltd [2024] EWCA Civ 825. [2024] Bus LR 1589, [2024] WLR(D) 339 on 19 July 2024 which I discussed in Patents - the Appeal in Comptroller v Emotional Perceptions   on 26 Aug 2024, the UK Intellectual Property Office has published new  Guidelines for examining patent applications relating to artificial intelligence (AI)  and  Scenarios applying the guidelines for examining patent applications for AI . The Guidelines state that AI inventions as computer-implemented inventions. They explain that AI inventions rely on mathematical methods and computer programs in some way. The law excludes from patent protection inventions relating solely to a mathematical method or a program for a computer but when a...