NIPC Law

An early form of FinTech Photo HB Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert A lot of money is going into FinTech (financial services technology) in this country and overseas nowadays including accelerator programmes promoted by our central bank and one of our major clearers (see the Bank of England's FinTech page  and the Barclays Accelerator  as well as details of the other accelerator programmes in the table below). But how is all that investment in FinTech to be protected if indeed it is to be protected at all?  In an extract from a longer article in Gluon.  Steve Findley and Vanni Torelli ask whether IP is so important to FinTech (see  Fintech Startups – is IP important?   The FinTech Times). In view of the amounts of money involved, I should be very surprised if it were not. Findley and Torelli argued that of the top 35 FinTec h  unicorns  than 25% have filed for patents. I am not in the least surprised by that statistic....

Houses of Parliament Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert The action arising from groundless threats has been one of the most perplexing features of our  intellectual property law  both for foreign owners of IPR in this country and their legal advisors (see Prince Plc v Prince Sports Group Inc [1998] FSR 21) and even non-specialist lawyers in the United Kingdom (see Brain v Ingeledew Brown Benson and Garrett and another  [1996] FSR 341). Under s.70 of the Patents Act 1977  and similar provisions in other IP legislation, a letter threatening proceedings that would be quite acceptable in most countries and even in the UK in respect of most other causes of action can land the lawyer or attorney who wrote it, and the client on whose behalf the letter was written, in a whole heap of trouble that sometimes results in an infringer getting away with his or her wrongdoing. S.70 (1) provides: "Where a person (whether or not the proprietor of, or entitled ...

Royal Courts of Justice Photo Michael Reeve Creative Commons Licence Jane Lambert Perry v F H Brundle and Others [2017] EWHC 678 (IPEC) (30 March 2017) Para 1 of the Part 3C Practice Direction, which is made pursuant to CPR 3.11 , enables the court to make a range of orders known as "civil restraint orders" against a party which has issued claims or made applications that are totally without merit. Each of those orders restricts access to the courts. They are known respectively as: a limited civil restraint order ; an extended civil restraint order ; and a general civil restraint order . I discussed the jurisdiction to make those orders in Civil Restraint Orders in IPEC - Perry v Brundle   12 Oct 2015. Readers will see that the most restrictive of those orders is the general civil restraint order which restrains the person against whom it is made from issuing any claim or making any application in the High Court or the County Court...

Jane Lambert Court of Appeal Unwired Planet International Ltd v Huawei Technologies Co Ltd   [2017] EWCA Civ 266 (12 April 2017) Lords Justices Gross and Floyd and Mr Justice Arnold  In  Unwired Planet International Ltd v Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Others [2015] EWHC 3366 (Pat) (23 Nov 2015), Unwired Planet sued Huawei, Samsung and Google for patent infringement. The patent in suit was European patent 2,229,744 entitled Method and arrangement in a wireless communication network  which is concerned with polling for a wireless communication network. The trial judge, Mr Justice Birss, explained at para [2] of his judgment that "In this context the word "poll" refers to a message sent by a transmitter of data to the receiver to ask the receiver to tell the transmitter what information has been received. In the context of the mobile radio networks in this case, the poll asks the receiver to send a "status report". When the trans...