NIPC Law

A Huawei Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer ("DSLAM") Author Jnnis Walter Licence CC BY-SA 4.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Court of Appeal (Lords Justices Arnold, Nugee and Birss) A daptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment Inc v British Telecommunications Plc [2023] EWCA Civ 451 (26 April 2023) This was an appeal by  Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment, Incorporated ("ASSIA")  against the judgment of Mrs Justice Falk in  Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment Inc v British Telecommunications Plc [2022] EWHC 1707 (Ch) (6 July 2022). Her ladyship dismissed ASSIA's claim for declarations on the construction of a patent licence granted by ASSIA to British Telecommunications Plc ("BT" ).  ASSIA's appeal came on before Lords Justices Arnold, Nugee and Birss on 29 March 2023.  By their judgment which was handed down on 26 April 2022, their lordships unanimously dismissed the appeal (see Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment Inc v ...

Author Natural Earth Data Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported Source Wikipedia China Jane Lambert There are almost two and a half times as many internet users in China as there are citizens of the USA and some of the biggest e-commerce companies on earth are located in that country. These include  Alibaba  in  Hangzhou ,  Baidu  in Beijing and  Tencent  in Guangzhou. A lot of disputes arise anywhere in e-commerce between suppliers and their customers. internet service providers and their subscribers and between different internet users, In China, they can be referred to three specialist internet courts based respectively in Hangzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou. The first of those courts was established in Hangzhou which has an  English language website . According to that website, the court resolves contract disputes arising from online shopping, product liability disputes arising from online s...

German Federal Supreme Court Source Wikipedia On one of the hottest days of the year so far members of the Intellectual Property Bar Associaiton  gathered in the Pension Room of Gray's Inn to hear a presentation on German copyright law by Prof Ansgar Ohly . The title of his talk was Birthday Train or Eurostar which cleverly summed up the subject matter in a nutshell. The   Birthday Train is the name of a case before the German Federal Supreme Court in which the Court relaxed the originality requirement for the subsistence of copyright in works that could be protected by design registration in order to give effect to the Designs Directive (Directive 98/71/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 October 1998 on the legal protection of designs). The case reference is  Urteil vom 13. November 2013 - I ZR 143/12 - Geburtstagszug   and there is a summary of the case here. The reference to Eurostar was an allusion to that Direct...

It is perhaps eccentric if not downright ungrateful to promote a different business model for the music and motion picture industries having rebuilt my practice on advising and representing defendants to copyright infringement claims by trade associations in those industries but a flower is a great deal cheaper than an intellectual property lawyer and not necessarily less effective.  Before considering Mr.Justice Arnold's judgment in  EMI Records Ltd and Others v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd and Others     [2013] EWHC 379 (Ch), [2013] WLR(D) 86 it is perhaps worth watching Amanda Palmer's video on The Art of Asking and pondering her message which I have reproduced from the TED website : "Don't make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan. Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer...

In Injunctions against ISPs I discussed Mr. Justice Arnold's judgment in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & Others v British Telecommunications Plc [2011] EWHC 2714 (Ch) (26 Oct 2011) where he ordered BT to use Cleenfeed to hinder its subscribers from accessing the website known as Newzbin II. That judgment was applauded by those who lobby on behalf of the film, recording, games, publishing and other creative industries though by no means everybody in the industries themselves. I saw such lobbyists at work some years ago during consultations at the Patent Office on the implementation of the enforcement directive. For convenience I refer to them as Big Copyright. Scarlet Less than a month afterwards the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in C-70/10 Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM [2011] EUECJ C-70/10 (24 Nov 2011) that a number of Council directives precludes an injunction that compels an ISP to install monitoring software "which is cap...

On 26 Oct 2011, Mr. Justice Arnold ordered British Telecommunications Plc to: "adopt the following technical means to block or attempt to block access by its customers to the website known as Newzbin2 currently accessible at www.newzbin.com, its domains and sub-domains and including payments.newzbin.com and any other IP address or URL whose sole or predominant purpose is to enable or facilitate access to the Newzbin2 website. The technical means to be adopted are: (i) IP address re-routing in respect of each and every IP address from which the said website operates and which is notified in writing to the Respondent by the Applicants or their agents; and (ii) DPI-based URL blocking utilising at least summary analysis in respect of each and every URL available at the said website and its domains and sub-domains and which is notified in writing to the Respondent by the Applicants or their agents." This order was granted upon the application of a group of film and TV programme ...