NIPC News

Jane Lambert While hardly unexpected. the confirmation given yesterday to Joff Wild  and others that "the UK will not be seeking involvement in the UP/UPC system." is nonetheless regrettable.   No country stood to gain more from the Unified Parent Court and the unitary patent than the UK because it would have reduced considerably the costs of patent prosecution in Europe and patent enforcement in the UK.  That is why both the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property  and the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth  urged HM government to push for a single European patent for the UK and other EU member states with a unified court for the resolution of disputes over such patents. The excuse given to Mr Wild and other journalists for this country's volte-face is that: "Participating in a court that applies EU law and bound by the CJEU is inconsistent with our aims of becoming an independent self-governing nation.” That was ju...

Jane Lambert I hope all my readers had a good Christmas and I wish them a happy and prosperous New Year, A hot topic for the New Year is likely to be the legal protection of inventions, artistic and literary works, designs and other intellectual assets that are created by machines.  Three of the papers of the Life Science IP Conference which was held at at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel on 26 and 27 Nov 2019 addressed the topic as did two of the papers at the International Copyright Law Conference  which was held in London a few days later.  Francis Gurry , the Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (the UN specialist agency for IP) discussed the subject in an interview entitled Intellectual property in a data-driven world   which appeared in the October issue of the WIPO Magazine. This is not a new subject.  I can remember articles and conference papers on the topic for as long as I have been at the Bar.  ...

Intellectual Property Office Crown copyright, Licence Intellectual Property Office Jane Lambert One of the recommendations of Prof. Hargreaves's review of intellectual property and growth  which was commissioned and largely implemented by the Coalition government in 2011 was that "The IPO should draw up plans to improve accessibility of the IP system to smaller companies who will benefit from it. This should involve access to lower cost providers of integrated IP legal and commercial advice." The Intellectual Property Office has tried to carry out that recommendation by developing support tools for use by academics, business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, professional advisors and other members of the public.  There is now a portal for those tools on the government's website at  https://www.ipo.gov.uk/ip-support/ . The portal looks like this: There are 9 colour coded icons: IP Equip IP Heakthcheck B2B Toolkit ...

Author Voytek Pavlik Public Domain Dedication   Source Wikipedia Cryptocurrency  Jane Lambert Financial technology ("FinTech") is one of the most rapidly growing technologies on the planet and one that the UK is ideally placed to develop for the reasons that Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, explained in his presentation  to the Deutsche Bundesbank G20 conference on “Digitising finance, financial inclusion and financial literacy” (see also his speech  on YouTube). I have written a number of articles on the topic which I have indexed in the "Further Reading" table of my FinTech Index page .  The latest of those articles is my note on the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce's  Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts   which I published on Saturday. The LegalTech Delivery Panel which presented the Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts has also posted a scaleup glossary  to its website together with...

Jane Lambert Before he began his distinguished career in the WIPO, Francis Gurry  was best known for a rather good book on the law of confidence .  It is now in its second edition having been updated and edited by Tanya Aplin, Lionel Bently, Phillip Johnson, and Simon Malynicz. Although the law of confidence can be used to prevent unauthorized use or disclosure of any kind of secret information, it is the legal mechanism by which trade secrets are protected in the United Kingdom.  It is probably the most widely used means of protecting investment in innovation and creativity in this and other common law countries. The law of confidence offers a number of advantages over patents and other registered rights.  It is free. It arises whenever information the use or disclosure of which would benefit the confidant or harm the confider is imparted in circumstances that give rise to an obligation of confidence. It cannot be revoked as a patent can and t...

Jane Lambert The World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") published its World Intellectual Property Indicators 2018   on 16 Oct 2019.  In September 2019, the Intellectual Property Office published  Facts and figures: patent, trade mark, design and hearing data: 2018   for the UK. The headline figures that appear on page 7 of the WIPO report is that there were over 3.3 million patent applications in 2018 which is 5.2% above the figure for 2017. China accounted for 46.4% of those applications with over 1.5 million. That was an increase of 11.6% on the number of Chinese applications for the previous year. The USA was number 2 with 597, a 1.6% decline on the figure for the previous year.  Japan came a distant third with 313,567 applications. China accounted for more than half of the world's 14.3 million trade mark applications with 7.4 million applications. Again the USA came in second with 640,181 and Japan third with 512,156.  Chin...

Jan 2011 Jan 2013 Jan 2015 Jan 2017 Jan 2019 0 24K 48K 72K 96K Jane Lambert Something remarkable has happened to my NIPC Law blog.  Its readership has soared like a rocket. For the first time ever, it has received more than 100,000 hits in a single month. This is not entirely unexpected I have tried to publish a short post on something new every day whether a case note on a recent decision, an analysis of a new statute or some other important development.  Although I hope my articles will be useful to specialist lawyers and patent and trade mark attorneys I am aware that not every reader is an IP specialist.  Indeed, many are not lawyers at all. For non-specialists, I have posted information pages on copyright , patents , registered and unregistered  designs, trade marks and so on    These can be accessed from the home page  of the NIPC Law blog, clicking on the menu bar in the top left-hand corner (three short lines) and scrol...