NIPC Law

Intellectual Property Office Crown Copyright Reproduced courtesy of the IPO Jane Lambert Building the Evidence Base on the Performance of the UK Patent System   is a report written by the Economics, Research, and Evidence team of the Intellectual Property Office. It was published on 23 Aug 2017. The title of the report appears to refer to the first recommendation of Prof. Hargreaves's review of Intellectual property and growth (see Digital Opportunity   May 2011): "Evidence . Government should ensure that development of the IP System is driven as far as possible by objective evidence. Policy should balance measurable economic objectives against social goals and potential benefits for rights holders against impacts on consumers and other interests. These concerns will be of particular importance in assessing future claims to extend rights or in determining desirable limits to rights." It consists of 76 pages including covers and is divided into...

Rt. Hon. Theresa May MP Author: Home office Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons Licence Jane Lambert In her Lancaster House speech of the 17 Jan 2017 (the transcript of which can be found on The Independent's website ) the Prime Minister acknowledged that "Britain might at times have been seen as an awkward member state" However, there is one policy upon which we have always been impeccably  communautaire   That   has been the scheme to establish a single European patent for the territories of all the EU member states with a single European patent court. We were one of the few parties to ratify the Community Patent Convention  in 1975 shortly after we joined the EEC. Ever since then our government has participated constructively in deliberations and negotiations both for a Community patent within the framework of the EU (see Community Patent  on the Eur-Lex website) and a European patent litigation agreement ("EPLA") as an optional...

British Library Photo Wikipedia One of the consequences of extending the term of copyright in many types of copyright has been a massive increase in the number of works in which copyright subsists whose owners cannot be identified or found. Such works are known as "orphan works" and HM government claims that there are some 91 million of them in the UK alone.  Because their owners cannot be traced orphan works cannot lawfully be reproduced even for preservation. Consequently, works recorded on such media as celluloid film and magnetic tape may be lost for ever.  Much of that work is culturally important and some of it is of considerable scientific interest such as patient records in studies of malaria.  In Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth   Professor Hargreaves described the problem of orphan works as "the starkest failure of the copyright framework to adapt." The Orphan Works Directive This is not of cour...

 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...

Lord Younger, Former Minister for IP Crown Copyright, Open Government Licence In Digital Opportunity, A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth   Professor Ian Hargreaves made 10 recommendations for IP policy which I discussed at length in " IP Policy: Does Hargreaves say Anything New?"  24 June 2011. Some of those recommendations required primary legislation. Others did not.  As I said in my article, Hargreaves was not the first review of IP policy in recent years and most of the previous ones had been left to gather dust.   I suspected the same would happen to Hargreaves. Implementation of Hargreaves To my surprise and delight, Hargreaves's recommendations were accepted broadly by HM Government ( "HMG" ) (see  "The Government Response to the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth" Aug 2011).  Not only that but HMG actually started to consult on the recommendations and even to implement some of those that do not r...