NIPC News

Design Museum, London Author Anthony O'Neill   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Every so often, the government of the day has a bash at changing design law.  The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 abolished copyright as a means of protecting product designs, introduced a new intellectual property right known as unregistered design right and modified the Registered Designs Act 1949.  That statute was further modified by the Registered Design Regulations, which implemented Directive 98/71/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 October 1998 on the legal protection of designs.  Council Regulation (EC) No 6/2002 of 12 December 2001 on Community designs introduced two more IP rights known respectively as registered and unregistered Community designs.  The Intellectual Property Act 2014 brought further modifications to both registered designs and unregistered design rights.  Brexit abolished regist...

Jane Lambert  When I was called to the Bar our design law was relatively straightforward. Features of shape, configuration, pattern or ornament applied to an article by any industrial process or means with eye appeal that were new or original could be registered under the Registered Designs Act 1949 for 5 renewable periods of 5 years each up to a total of 25 years. Design drawings for manufactured products were artistic works within the meaning of s.3 (1) of the Copyright Act 1956 and so long as the drawing was original copyright protected the design for the life of the author of the drawing plus 50 years. All this came to an end on 1 Aug 1989 when the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 came into force.  The Act overhauled the Registered Designs Act 1949 and provided that it was "not an infringement of any copyright in a design document or model recording or embodying a design for anything other than an artistic work or a typeface to make an article to the design or t...

Jane Lambert Earlier this year the World Intellectual Property Organization  published WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2018 .  This is a compendium   of statistics on worldwide patent, design and trade mark filings.  The headline figures are that there were 3.17 million patent applications around the world in 2017, as well as 1.78 million utility model applications, 12.39 million trade mark applications and 1.24 million applications for the registration of industrial designs.  The lion's share of those application cams from Asia with 97.1% of the world's utility model, 67.9% of its industrial design, 66.6% of its trade mark and 65.1% of its patent filings.  North America came second in patenting with 20.3% and Europe third with 11.2% but Europe was ahead of North America in trade mark, industrial design and utility model registrations.  Some 85.1% of the world's 3.17 million patent applications were filed with the world's top five ...

Jane Lambert I have been invited to speak ar MBL's IP for Commercial Lawyers - 2018 Conference  which will take place in London between 09:30 and 17:15 on 27 Nov 2018.  The conference will cover a wide range of topics from basic concepts to the effect of Brexit on IP rights.  My topic is " Patents - What happens after Brexit£  which will address the thorny question of whether there is any chance that the Unified Patent Court will ever open its doors. As brands , designs  and  plant varieties  can be protected throughout the European Union by EU trade marks , registered  and unregistered Community designs  and Community plant variety rights  and as much of our national trade mark, registered design, copyright, trade secrecy and patent law has been harmonized by EU directives, our withdrawal from the EU will have far-reaching consequences for British businesses which I have charted in my Brexit blog . Recently the go...

Jane Lambert Our IP system, which is ranked by TaylorWessing as one of the best in the world (see The Global Intellectual Property Index ) consists of some rights that subsist under national law and others that subsist under EU law. When we eventually leave the EU, those rights that subsist under EU law such as the EU trade mark and the Community design will fall away. I discussed those consequences generally in What Sort of IP Framework do we need after Brexit and what are we likely to get?   3 July 2016. In this article I consider how those changes will affect the British fashion industry which relies on EU trade marks and Community designs more than most. I have chosen this industry because I have conducted seminars on IP and fashion in London and Leeds (see  IP and Fashion Law   12 Sept 2015 London IP and Tech,  IP and Fashion Seminar - 7 Oct 2015   20 Sept 2015 and  Second Course on IP and the Fashion Industry   27 May 2016), ...