NIPC Law

Intellectual Property Office Crown Copyright Jane Lambert Intellectual Property Office (Phil Thorpe) I nnermost Ltd. v Warm BL 0/464/19 6 March 2020 Over the years the UK has consistently trailed its neighbours in the number of European patent applications.  In 2018. for instance, the UK filed 5,738 compared to 43,612 from the USA, 26,734 from Germany, 22,615 from Japan, 10,317 from France, 9,401 from China, 7,927 from Switzerland, 7,296 from South Korea and 7,149 from the Netherlands (see European Patent Office Annual Report 2018 Statistics at a Glance ). I had always attributed our performance to the high cost of enforcement proceedings in the English courts but the changes to CPR Part 63 and the Part 63 Practice Direction which reduced and capped the costs of litigating in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court in 2010 do not seem to have made much difference (see Jane Lambert New Patent County Court Rules 31 Oct 2010).  There may be another exp...

Originality is not defined by the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 ( "CDPA ") , except by reference to databases under s.3A. Generally, originality means the application of independent skill and labour. The threshold is not high and need not be creative, innovative or novel but it must be more than slavish copying as in xerography. Meaning of Independent Skill and Labour In  Sawkins v Hyperion Records Ltd.  [2005] EWCA Civ 565 (19 May 2005)   a musicologist has set out to restore as faithfully as possible the work of a 17th and early 18th century composer. One of the objections to his claim was that he had not actually created any new music. The Court of Appeal considered that to be irrelevant. The House of Lords had previously held in  Walter v. Lane  [1900] AC 539 that copyright subsisted in a newspaper reporter's notes even though he had intended to capture as closely as possible the words of a politician's speech. There had been some debate as to whether tha...

I wrote a note on Mr Justice Rattee's decision in  Norowzian v Arks Ltd and Others [1998] EWHC 315 (Ch) (17 July 1998) some 10 years ago and updated it slightly after the appeal was dismissed ([1999] EWCA Civ 3014).    I had another look at the case while updating the IP/IT Update website and found that Lord Justice Nourse's decision contained some interesting dicta on the nature of copyright, originality and the interface between film and dramatic copyrights. The Issue The question was whether a young director's show reel, "Joy" , had been copied. The claimant had made a film which Mr Justice Rattee described as   a very short film with no dialogue :  it was shot by Mr Norowzian on the flat rooftop of a building in London. The set was merely a canvas sheet draped over an existing structure on the roof where the filming took place. The cast consists of one man only, casually dressed, and the whole action of the film consists of that one man dancing to music. He ...

In  NFL Enterprises LP v Sotiros and Peter Restaurant Company Ltd. and others , the plaintiffs sued a number of bars and restaurants situated just across the border from Buffalo for infringement of the copyright subsisting in television transmissions of football games in which the Buffalo Bills were playing. The plaintiffs, who claimed the television rights to National Football League games, allowed major networks to televise NFL matches on condition that they did not transmit live pictures of a team’s game to its home city. The networks in turn inserted the condition into their contracts with local television stations. The plaintiffs argued that the programmes could not lawfully be received by the defendants. Still less could they be shown to their customers, most of whom would have crossed from New York State. They applied for summary judgment under the equivalent of CPR Part 24. The Application for Summary Judgment Giving unconditional leave to defend, Jerome ACJ held that the plain...

This was a preliminary reference from the Oviedo Court of First Instance under article 234 of the Treaty of Rome.    The European Court held that the  Term Directive  (Council Directive 93/83/EEC of 27 September 1993 on the co-ordination of certain rules concerning copyright and rights related to copyright applicable to satellite broadcasting and cable re-transmission) had no application to a claim against the defendant hotel by a collecting society for injunctions to restrain re-diffusion of satellite television signals to hotel rooms without the society's consent. The Directive neither requires member states to introduce a specific cable re-transmission right nor defines the scope of such right. They are obliged merely to ensure compliance with relevant copyrights and related rights when programmes from other member states are re-transmitted within their territory. Interestingly, the Commission submitted that the re-diffusion of television programmes to a large number of rooms m...

First published 28 May 2005 Some years ago I was consulted by a small pottery that had received a letter from the legal advisors to a much larger pottery complaining of infringement of copyright in the designs of one of their product ranges. My solicitors showed me samples of the complainant’s products. The back of each item bore words stating that the product was a genuine 18th  century design. The letter of response that I settled for my clients alluded to that stamp.  I never heard anything more about that case. It may well be that my draft did the trick and threw the complainant’s advisors off the scent. Equally, it may be that the complainant replied that the response was missing the point, that sufficient artistic work had been done in the late 20th  century to reset the 18th  design to constitute a separate copyright and that my clients prudently acknowledged the point. Whatever happened, it highlighted one of the more interesting questions of copyright law, namely what is the r...

Just to let you know that I have uploaded the passing off page in the brands tree of WikIP. Just in case you missed it, the revisions to the European Patent Convention agreed at Munich on 29 Nov 2000 came into force yesterday. It's already spawned the Patents Act 2004 . If you want a belly laugh just look at the sort of guff that our wonderful government trumpeted in its press release (see Lord Triesman's press release on the UK-IPO website). Not a word about art 2 of the Protocol on the Interpretation of art 69 EPC you'll notice. They talk about nothing else in Slaithwaite Working Men's Club. A free Granges pork pie by the way, for the first reader not of West Riding residence or provenance to ring me up with the correct pronunciation of Slaithwaite. Clue, a pompous specimen of the y o u n g ba r from the Smoke called Braithwaite got very tetchy when I referred to him as "my learned friend Mr Browit". Not surprising really when you think about the total lack...