NIPC News

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...

Jane Lambert In this article, I am challenging the following myths that are probably responsible for our trailing many of our competitors in the number of patent, design and trade mark applications. Myth #1  There's no point in acquiring an intellectual property right because you can never afford to enforce it. It is probably still the case that England and Wales (and indeed Scotland and Northern Ireland) are among the most expensive countries in the world to bring a full blown patent action.  That is because our legal system provides for close investigation of the evidence and full consideration of the arguments which tends to assure the most just outcome. But most IP cases do not require that degree of scrutiny. For the last 6 ½ years the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (formerly the Patents County Court) has provided a high-quality dispute resolution service where the issues are defined in advance, trials are limited to two days and recoverab...

Inaugural Conference of World Business Angel Association in Beijing 2009 Author JohnnyOnTheSpot  Licensed by the author Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert In IP's not just for Big Brands and High Tech Businesses  27 Aug 2016 I wrote: "In my career at the Bar, have known far more businesses that have failed from having too much IP than too little. Some of those failures had been caused by patents that cost many thousands of pounds to obtain but could never be worked. Others by disputes that were abandoned because the rights owner (who in many cases had a strong claim) simply ran out of money." In many instances, such patents and other IP rights were sought to attract, or to fulfil a condition for, investment. While it is understandable that an angel or private equity investor should desire the most extensive legal protection possible for his or her investment a patent for an invention that may never be worked or any IP right that the business cann...

WIPO head office, Geneva Author Melatron Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert In my experience as a domain name dispute resolution panellist for the WIPO as well as a member of the Bar who has advised and settled pleadings for both complainants and respondents, most domain name disputes are straightforward. Moreover, most complaints are decided in favour of the complainant.  Of all the cases that have been referred to WIPO since 1999, some 21,399 or nearly 86.0% have resulted in a transfer to the complainant and 407 or 1.6% in a cancellation. A complaint has been denied in only 3,086 cases making 12.4% of the total (see  Case Outcome (Consolidated): All Years   on the WIPO website). Those figures are hardly surprising as it is rare for a complaint to be defended and even rarer for a response to disclose any merit. It can therefore be said with some confidence that most panellists' decisions are likel...

Jane Lambert On Thursday 26 June 2013 I introduced some 20 lawyers and others to intellectual property law. To be fair some members of my audience knew a great deal about the topic. However, I think they all learned something new. Instead of talking about the mechanics of IP law we discussed policy.  How IP has to strike a balance between two conflicting public interests:: incentivizing creativity and innovation; while safeguarding competition and freedom of trade. This tension between these conflicting public interests has existed since the Statute of Monopolies 1623 and the Statute of Anne 1710 and it is essential to appreciate that tension in order to understand IP law.   As it was not possible to cover everything in the 2 hours available to me each delegate got the following 16 page handout. This is the first of a series of talks on IP which we shall offer to solicitors and others over the course of the year.. In this series we shal...