NIPC News

By Muhammad Karns - Judicial Office Twitter feed., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78284579 Jane Lambert Earlier today I uploaded to Slideshare a presentation that I gave in February 2023 to members of the University of St Andrews Law Society  entitled A Career at the Bar of England and Wales .  I did so because I get a lot of enquiries on how to make a career in IP, as well as requests for work experience.  I had just come across a website called IP Careers   which lists careers advice , courses ,  jobs  and news .  Its only drawback is that it focuses on opportunities for patent and trade mark attorneys and openings at the Intellectual Property Office and European Patent Office but does not seem to have much for barristers or solicitors specializing in intellectual property. A website that does cover all the intellectual property professions is Careers in Ideas  which is managed by IP Inclusive , a great organizati...

Jane Lambert On 28 April 2022, the European Patent Office and the European Investment Office published a joint report entitled  Deep tech innovation in smart connected technologies A comparative analysis of SMEs in Europe and the United States April 2022 .  Although the report contained a lot of positive findings, the headline of the EPO's news item was decidedly gloomy: "Despite impressive patent activity, Europe’s small deep tech businesses lag behind their US counterparts." Part of the reason for the gloom is that report focused on the EU rather than Europe as a whole. Consequently, it missed the fact that the UK has almost 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises developing 4IR technologies (nearly twice as many as Germany with 570 and nearly two and a half times as many as France with 400) and that London hosts one of the top clusters of such businesses (see page 30 and the map on page 29 of the main report). It would have been interesting to know the reasons for t...

Jane Lambert The World Intellectual Property Organization its World Intellectual Property Indicators Report for 2020 on 7 Dec 2020. For the first time since the 2998 world economic downturn, there had been a 3% drop in patenting activity since 2018 but a sustained increase in the number of applications for trade marks, designs and plant breeders' rights.  The reason for the reduction in the number of patent applications from 3.3 million in 2018 to 3,2 million in 2019 is that the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) received 9.2% fewer applications in 2019 than it did in the previous year and the Japan Patent Office ("JPO") 1.8% fewer.  The CNIPA still received 1.2 million patent applications which was more than any other office. The US Patent and Trademark Office came second with 621,453, the JPO third with 307,969, the Korea Intellectual Property Office fourth with 218,975 and the European Patent Office fifth with 181,479.  Intellectual property ...

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...

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...

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.  ...

Jane Lambert It is often said that intellectual property is crucial to the efficient functioning of modern economies but there is much less research to support that assertion than might be supposed.  However, some valuable research on the topic has recently been undertaken by the  European Patent Office ("EPO")  and the  European Union Intellectual Property Office ("EUIPO") , In September 2013, those institutions published a joint report entitled  Intellectual property rights intensive industries: contribution to economic performance and employment in the European Union .  The EPO and EUIPO published an updated report in October 2016 and they have now published their third report. The report identifies 353 IP intensive industries in the EU which employ directly 63 million people and make work for another 21 million in businesses that supply those industries.  Those same industries generated output worth €6.6 trillion betwee...

Jane Lambert Earlier this year the World Intellectual Property Organization  published WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2018 .  This is a compendium   of statistics on worldwide patent, design and trade mark filings.  The headline figures are that there were 3.17 million patent applications around the world in 2017, as well as 1.78 million utility model applications, 12.39 million trade mark applications and 1.24 million applications for the registration of industrial designs.  The lion's share of those application cams from Asia with 97.1% of the world's utility model, 67.9% of its industrial design, 66.6% of its trade mark and 65.1% of its patent filings.  North America came second in patenting with 20.3% and Europe third with 11.2% but Europe was ahead of North America in trade mark, industrial design and utility model registrations.  Some 85.1% of the world's 3.17 million patent applications were filed with the world's top five ...

Jane Lambert In a press release published yesterday, the European Patent Office announced a visit by Tim Moss, the Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks,  and Sean Dennehey  to the European Patent Office (see  Meeting with UK Intellectual Property Office highlights role of patents in supporting innovation   26 March 2018).  According to the press release, the Comptroller and Mr Dennehey met the EPO President Benoît Battistelli. The Comptroller and President discussed recent developments in IPO, including the EPO annual report, bilateral co-operation and preparations for setting up the new unitary patent system. The EPO Vice-President updated the British delegation on such topics as search and examination, digital systems, the EPO's quality management system, and European and international co-operation.  Apparently, "a new and ambitious strategy for the UK IPO, a key element of which is to draw upon the knowledge...