NIPC Law

The Inn Sign for the Beehive public house in  Grantham Photo Wikipedia The Lincolnshire town of Grantham educated one of the world's greatest scientists and the first woman to be British prime minister (see  "Frit" - Merck Sharp Dohme Corp v Teva Pharma BV   25 March 2012). It has a magnificent parish church and is home to Chantry Dance Company which is very special to me as you will see from the last video clip in  Chantry Dance Company's Sandman and Dream Dance   10 May 2014 Terpsichore if you read that far. It has a pub called The Beehive with a real beehive for the pub sign (how's that for imaginative branding). Each Autumn it holds a science and arts festival in honour of Sir Isaac Newton called Gravity Fields (see  Gravity Fields Festival - there's much more to Grantham than Mrs T   8 Aug 2014 East Midlands IP). So you might think that the good people of Grantham would be very interested in intellectual prope...

 On 18 Sept 2008 I wrote in IP Yorkshire : "Team GB may have done very well at the Beijing Olympics but our inventors and entrepreneurs are nothing like as successful in the European patent application stakes. As can be seen from the ..... table [in the article], we trail a poor 7th in the number of European patent applications. Not only do we lag behind the economic super-powers, the USA and Japan, but we compare badly even to France and Germany with similar populations and GDP. We even trail the Netherlands and Switzerland with a third and an eighth of our population respectively and are about to be overtaken by distant South Korea which was a battlefield 50 years ago."  I considered why the UK does so badly and found that it was because "start-ups and other small businesses, that are the mainspring of innovation in the UK as in most of our competitors, make much less use of the intellectual property system than their equivalents in other countries and, indeed, mu...