NIPC Law

I always enjoy going to court in the Rolls Building. It is a great improvement on the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand or even the new Civil Justice Centres in Liverpool and Manchester. But this court is expensive to run which is why HM Government is about to increase the cost of issuing a claim worth over £10,000 to 5% of the value of the claim. As I say in  How to enforce your IP claim after court fees sky rocket   7 March 2014 NIPC Inventors' Club, some litigants will be faced with a whopping 622% fee increase. That falls well within the jurisdiction  of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court which was set up to make it easier for British SME to enforce their intellectual property rights. However, £10,000 is a daunting expense for many such businesses and it is likely to be one more reason for their not protecting their intellectual assets. However, there are things that an SME can do and I have set those out in my article: Limit your damages to £10...

In my early years at the Bar I did a lot of work for John Morris who was in-house legal advisor to the NCC (National Computing Centre).  The NCC had been established in 1966 as an autonomous not-for-profit organization, to be the "voice of the computer user",  encourage the use of computers in the UK and  offer education and training in computers. John spotted an opportunity for his company. He saw a need for source code escrow and persuaded his employers to offer one of the first escrow services in the UK. Escrow is an arrangement by which a software house or software maintenance contractor deposits the latest version of a computer program in human readable form known as "the source code" to a trusted third party such as the NCC ("the escrow agent") with instructions to release the source code to the customer should the software house or maintenance contractor be unable or unwilling to maintain the program because of insolvency or some other ca...