NIPC News

Punts on the Cam © 2017 Jane Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert This year's Cambridge IP Law Summer School lived up to expectations . Cambridge is delightful at any time of the year.  It was good to see it just before Christmas when the winter school took place. The course is stimulating even if it is held online as happened in 2020 .  But the best place to hold it is Cambridge and Summer is the best time. The course takes place at Downing College which has produced many of the country's leading practitioners and academic lawyers.  One of them was Christopher Stothers  whose talk on arbitration of intellectual property disputes was one of the highlights of my week.  We had a lot of good speakers from several countries. Delegates came from Belgium, Denmark, the Irish Republic amd Saudi Arabia as well as the UK. IP law has changed significantly since our departure from the EU. Our government is negotiating free trade and other agreements with the government...

Author Monsarc Public Domain Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert One of the high points of my year as an intellectual property lawyer has been the Cambridge IP Law Summer School at Downing College, Cambridge. It is addressed by some of the world's leading IP practitioners and scholars.  For the last few years, I have been invited to contribute to their discussions.   Not even Covid19 managed to stop the event though it did change it.  Last year it was held online.  The presentations and the Q & A discussions were, as always, excellent.  The only element that we missed was networking.  Cambridge is a place to learn but it is also a place to have fun.  In previous years, the event organizers Informa Connect had offered all sorts of evening entertainments from a black-tie dinner to punting on the Cam. It was not possible to present those activities online. Narinder Hayer, Informa Connect's organizer, told me that she had hoped to retur...

Jane Lambert Since 2017 I have been invited to speak at the Cambridge IP Law Summer School.  I shared my experiences in Cambridge IP Law Summer School 2017   on 20 Aug 2017 and Cambridge IP Law Summer School 2019 on 19 Aug 2019. I am sorry to say that Downing College cannot host us this year because of the COVID-19 emergency.   Happily, not all is lost because Informa , which runs the course, has made arrangements to hold it online (see IP Law Summer School     10 to 20 Aug 2020). I shall deliver two papers: "TMT A SEP & FRAND": Standard essential patents and FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms for the licensing of such patents on 12 Aug 2020 at 15:20; and "Intellectual Property Enforcement Measures, Especially Anti-piracy Measures in the Digital Environment"  on 20 Aug 2020 at 14:25. When I was invited to give the first talk in November we had every hope of a decision of the Supreme Court on the topic....

Downing College Cambridge Jane Lambert Last week I was invited back to Cambridge by Knect365 to speak to the Cambridge IP Law Summer School  at Downing College. I was asked to repeat the talk on IP disputes and bilateral investment treaties that I gave to the 2017 summer school  and to mention the research on IP enforcement in the digital environment that Professor Frederick Mostert and I had carried out for the Advisory Committee on Enforcement of the WIPO (see Mostert and Lambert  Study on Intellectual Property Enforcement Measures, Especially Anti-piracy Measures in the Digital Environment – Executive Summary   and the full report) . I also chaired the final day's session on "Contentious IP". As in 2017, this year's course took place in Downing College's  Howard Building .  That building consists of a ground floor common room with a licensed bar and an auditorium on the floor above.  Morning coffee, afternoon tea and some ...

Entrance to Trinity College, Cambridge © 2017 Gita Mistry: all rights reserved Licensed with kind permission of the author Jane Lambert I spent last week at the  Cambridge IP Law Summer School  at Downing College.   It was a rare opportunity to listen to some of the leading practitioners in intellectual property law in beautiful surroundings in the company of some very bright young men and women from around the world.  It was also an opportunity to catch up with several old acquaintances whom I had met through the International Bar Association, Licensing Executives Society or World Intellectual Property Organization. The persons who attended the course came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were recently qualified associates from several leading law firms. A few were trainees.  One came from a major pharmaceutical company.  Another worked in-house. There were several civil servants. One attendee ca...