NIPC News

  Jane Lambert About 30 years ago, I attended a workshop on the arbitration of intellectual property disputes. The speakers included  Dr Francis Gurry  and His Honour Peter Ford.  At that time, Dr Gurry was an Australian academic who had written a rather good book on the law of confidence . He went on to become Director-General of the WIPO. Peter Ford was the first judge of the Patents County Court which was the predecessor to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ("IPEC"). Two alternative dispute resolution services were set up as a result of that workshop.  One was an arbitration and mediation panel attached to the Patents County Court under the leadership of Prof. Bryan Niblett.  I was a founder member.   I am not sure whether we ever had a case,  Certainly, nothing was referred to me and the panel was disbanded after a few years.   The other was the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") Arbitration and Mediation...

Alfa Tomei Spyder Author Brian Snelson Licence Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Source Wikipedia Mille Miglia    Jane Lambert Case No. DRO2018-0012 Automobile Club di Brescia v. Zhao Ke It is well known that the WIPO's  Arbitration and Mediation Centre resolves generic top-level domain name disputes . It also resolves top-level domain name disputes for a number of countries . One of those countries is Romania . Over the Christmas holidays, I was asked to consider a complaint by the Automobile Club of Brescia against one Zhao Ke in China.  I decided the case on 4 Jan 2019.  Those who are interested in the case will find my decision  here.   There was nothing unusual about this case either on the facts or in law but it was my first country code dispute and it concerned the famous Mille Miglia road race between Brescia and Rome and back. "Mille Miglia" means "1,000 miles" in Italian which was the approx...

Jane Lambert When you key in the name of a business or one of its products or services into the address of a modern browser like Chrome the chances are that it will take you to where you want to go. Increasingly frequently, however. such an exercise will lead you to a landing page with sponsored links and searches including links to products or services of the business you are trying to reach. Occasionally, it will even lead to a spoof site that looks and feels like a genuine site but if a user tries to order goods or services through it or simply leaves an email address all sorts of annoying things can happen of which serial spamming is probably the least to worry about. The reason why internet users are waylaid in this way is that it is very cheap and easy to register a domain name that is the same or similar to a business name or trade mark . Now registering a domain name that is the same as, or similar to, someone else's trade mark or business name without justif...