NIPC News

Manchester Civil Justice Centre Author Skip88 Licence Public Domain   Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Intellectual Property Crime Group  Knowledge Share, Introducing the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court Small Claims Track.  That was an online presentation given by Deputy District Judges Nicola Solomion and Richard Vary.  It consisted of 18 slides and lasted just over an hour.  Well over 140 people attended the call at one point.   I noted some familiar names in the Participants' list, including Barbara Cookson , Dids Macdonald  and Michael Edenborough . The presentation began with the observation that the court was now working well with good feedback.  The move to Manchester had been successful.   It had received additional resources which had enabled Deputy District Judge Vary to "rattle through his list."  Waiting times were now quite short.  Many cases were settled through...

By Kai Hendry from London, UK - Televised Star Craft, - Stork vs JJU 1, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2531978   Jane Lambert According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the worldwide e-sports industry is worth over US$200 billion and has about 3 billion players (see James Nurton Game on: Navigating intellectual property in esports ,  10 June 2024 EU IPO website).  The appeal of e-sports is likely to increase with the establishment of the Olympic Esports Games .  A lot of money is invested in branding, technology and content creation, which will be protected by trade marks, patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights. Infringement and licensing of those rights are likely to give rise to disputes between parties in different countries that cannot conveniently be resolved by litigation.  The Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC ) and the World Intellectual Property Organization have recently launched...

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Author bryan...   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert   In Patents: a New Resource Hub on Standard Essential Patents in May and HMG's other Proposals on FRAND Licensing ,  I wrote on 5 March 2025: "A standard essential patent ("SEP") is a patent that has to be worked in order to comply with a technical standard. Organizations that set such standards (known as standards-setting organizations or SSOs) require SEP proprietors to promise to license the use of their patents to businesses that want to make or distribute products that comply with those standards ("implementers") on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ("FRAND") terms as a condition for including their patents within the standards." I added that in theory such a condition looks very fair and ought to work very well but in many cases it doesn't.  That is because implementers delay paying fees until a c...

Intellectual Property Office, Newport Reproduced with kind permission of the Intellectual Property Office Jane Lambert   In  Protecting creativity, supporting innovation: IP enforcement 2020   which was published on 16 May 2020, the Intellectual Property Office promised to review periodically "existing methods of legal recourse for IP infringement to ensure they are effective, consistent, and proportionate."  On 5 Oct 2020, it announced a call for evidence from IP rights owners to inform that review.   The closing date for submissions is 11:45 on 2 Nov 2020. There are three key themes for the review;  the cost of legal challenges,  how accessible and effective the judicial process is, and  improvements to the Small Claims Track of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court.  There is also a discussion on whether to include registered designs disputes within the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Track. The Introduction  states that t...

Jane Lambert First Published 2 Nov 2011 JD Supra, Revised 30 Jan 2017 Essentially, there are two ways of resolving any kind of dispute: the parties can agree to settle; or  a third party, such as a judge, arbitrator or hearing officer , imposes a settlement on them.  They are not mutually exclusive. Some issues in a dispute may be settled by one method while other issues may be settled by another. Agreed Settlement There are two routes to an agreed settlement: Direct negotiation between the parties; or Mediation, that is to say, negotiation facilitated by a third party known as “a mediator”. There are also two negotiation strategies, namely positional and principled negotiation. Mediation developed out of principled negotiation. Direct Negotiation P ositional Negotiation:   The parties bargain. One side begins by demanding more than it expects to get while the other offers less than it expects to give. In subsequent exchanges, the pa...