NIPC News

  (c) 2023 NIPC all rights reserved St Salvator's College Quad 15 Feb 2023 Jane Lambert Just before Christmas Daniel Alexander KC held in  Oxford University Innovation Ltd v Oxford Nanoimaging Ltd  [2022] EWHC 3200 that the CEO of Oxford Nanoimaging Ltd had been a "consumer" within the meaning of reg 3 (1) of  The Unfair Contract Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 when he signed up as a research student at Oxford University.   His contract incorporated Oxford's intellectual property policy which vested the right to apply for patents for student inventions in the University. The learned deputy judge assessed that provision for fairness. On the facts before him, Mr Alexander found that the term had been fair but had he found otherwise the intellectual property policy would not have bound the student.  I discussed the case and its implications in  Patents: Oxford University Innovation Ltd v Oxford Nanoimaging Ltd   on 23 Jan 2023 in N...

Author   Andrew Woodvine   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Yesterday I delivered a seminar on intellectual property law to the teams working on research, innovation, commercialization and partnership support for  Bangor University . They were the professionals who negotiate licence and consultancy agreements and set up spin-off companies to exploit research carried out at the University. I gave PowerPoint presentations on the following topics between 14:00 and 17:00 with short breaks for questions and answers: An overview of intellectual property law covering the difference between intellectual property and intellectual assets, categorization of intellectual property rights, how brands , designs , technology and creativity are protected, the main features of patents , registered designs and supplementary unregistered designs , copyrights , rights in performances , unregistered design rights , trade marks , passing off and ob...

Standard youtube Licence Jane Lambert Cities have been motors of innovation and creativity throughout history,  Think of Periclean Athens, renaissance Florence, enlightenment Edinburgh and Silicon Valley.  Every year, the WIPO (the UN specialist agency for intellectual property) publishes a ranking of science and technology hotspots.   The list is compiled using the following methodology: "Inventors listed in patent applications under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), spanning the years 2014 to 2018.  Authors listed in scientific publications in the Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and covering the same period.  The geocoding of inventor and author addresses and the use of density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to the geocoded inventor and author points." The above film shows the top 10 clusters for 2020.  From a British perspective, it is disappointing that there are no British clusters i...

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...