NIPC News

UK Supreme Court Author Kelsey Farish   Licence CC BY 4.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Last week's Winter Intellectual Property Conference  by CTC Legal Events was different from almost every  IP conference or seminar that I had previously attended.  For a start, there were very few slides.  I had prepared some for my talk on FRAND, as had  Maria-Christina Peyman of Birketts for her review of leading IP cases, but most of the topics were moderated discussions.  Secondly, the conference took place in  the magnificently equipped London campus of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business .  Thirdly, the organizers attracted some of the biggest names in IP, such as Professor Sir Robin Jacob, a former Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal and Sam Williams, Head of Intellectual Property at Siemens.  A lot of information was squeezed into the 5th and 6th of November.  The organizers covered that grou...

Intellectual Property Office Crown Copyright 2007 Open Government Licence v3.0   Jane Lambert One of the talks that I gave at the Cambridge IP Law Winter School  was "TMT: A SEP and FRAND Overview".    I did not choose that title so I shall try to explain what I think it means.   "TMT" stands for technology, media and telecoms. TMT is a sector where there has been a lot of litigation about "SEPs".  SEPs are "standard-essential patents", that is to say, patents for inventions that a telecoms equipment manufacturer has to use if it is to implement a technical standard.  Technical standards are set by standards-setting organizations ("SSOs"). An important SSO for mobile communications is the European Telecommunications Standards Institute ("ETSI") .   "FRAND" is short for "fair", "reasonable" and "nondiscriminatory" and refers to the terms on which SEP owners are supposed to license the use...

US Copyright Office Author Matt Wade Licence Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Source Wikipedia US Copyright Office Jane Lambert Yesterday I received a phone call from an American lawyer who wanted to learn about the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court's Small Claims Track.  The reason she called is that she advises members of the US Congress who have introduced a bill "to establish an alternative dispute resolution program for copyright small claims, and for other purposes."  I answered her questions as well as I could and referred her to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court's website , the IPEC and Small Claims Track guides  as well as my own writings on the subject.  I also directed her to Judge Hacon's clerk for further information. The ADR programme for copyright small claims proposed by the members of Congress is very different from IPEC's Small Claims Track.  It does not appear to be a co...