NIPC News

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 :  Jack Torcello Licence  Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported Source  Wikipedia Jane Lambert In this Update, I discuss my article on FRAND. the article 50 negotiations with the remaining 27 EU member states. Silicon Roundabout, accessing free IP advice in Yorkshire and my presentation on copyright in photographs in Liverpool yesterday. FRAND Ever since the Statute of Monopolies 1623, the law has tried to balance the interests of consumers with those of inventors. The current manifestation of this balancing exercise occurs where an industry standard requires the use of patented inventions. Obviously, patentees expect and are entitled to be rewarded for their ingenuity but if consumers are to benefit fully from advantages in technology all manufacturers must be allowed to use the patented inventions. The question then arises on what terms and in particular at what rates should such inventions be licensed? The answer from cour...

Will Roebuck Jane Lambert In response to my article on patent revocation , Will Roebuck wrote: "Thanks for posting Jane - given that we want to attract more (and probably much younger) business entrepreneurs into UK, post Brexit (particularly in the Northern Powerhouse region) what's your recommended advice for choosing the best patent/IP legal expert? What do start-up entrepreneurs need to look for in a good IP lawyer?" Here is my reply.  Will, this is for you. The first thing to say is that intellectual property is far too important to be left to IP lawyers and patent and trade mark attorneys. IP should be on the curriculum of every business school in the country. Every entrepreneur, investor, business owner and manager should know how the law protects his or her brands , designs, technology and creative output and how to leverage such protection for the benefit of his or her business. If you do not already have such knowledge and experie...

Jane Lambert The politics.co website has just published an article entitled  Intellectual Property: why you should choose the UK   with a brilliant video on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, the Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, The British Association of the International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys, the Intellectual Property Lawyers Association and the Law Society. It makes several excellent points about our international connections, our commercial strengths, the quality of our counsel, litigators and patent and trade mark attorneys, the speed and thoroughness of our courts and our mother tongue. Wishing all my readers a great weekend.

Falling to BITs: the Eli Lilly and Philip Morris Cases NIPC Law  8 April 2017 Do the awards in Philip Morris v Australia and Eli Lilly v Canada mean that IP owners can't claim compensation from foreign governments if those governments fail to enforce their IP laws? Probably not, because nothing in those cases affects the principle that an investor that suffers expropriation of his IP rights can recover compensation for such expropriation .  More IP Yorkshire 10 April 2018 I was one of the speakers at CIPA's York meeting at the Principal Hotel. The others were Louise Edwards of Mazars, David Bloom of Safeguard IP and Kalim Yasseen of the IPO. Tony Rollins chaired the meeting. I spoke about litigation after 28 March 2017 when the EU treaties will cease to apply and considered the litigation framework we are likely to find then. Louise discussed changes to patent box relief in the Finance Act 2016 and the Finance Bill. David talked about all the new products in IP...

National Galleries of Scotland Author Finlay McWalter Source Wikpedia Creative Commons Licence Jane Lambert On 15 April 2016 I was invited to speak to t he Scottish meeting of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh on Preparing for the Unitary Patent and the UPC. I was one of four speakers. The others were: Catriona M Hammer  who spoke on Portfolio Strategy for Start-Ups, Spin-Outs and Other Small Businesses ; David Bloom of Safeguard IP who spoke on Intellectual Property Insurance Solutions ; and  Eleanor Wade of the Intellectual Property Office whose talk was entitled Updates form IPO. Over 50 patent attorneys and other IP professionals attended the meeting which was chaired by Andrea Brewster. I enjoyed all the presentations but I found Catriona's particularly interesting as I specialize in advising and representing start-ups and other SME. She has spent most of her career i...