NIPC Law

Standard YouTube Licence Jane Lambert When I was a graduate student at UCLA in the early 1970s I wanted to consult a book. I learned that it was not in our library but that it might be at Berkeley.   I filled out a simple form which someone typed into a keyboard,  Not long afterwards I received a reply.  At the time I was not very impressed because the same result could have been achieved by telex or even telegram. Since then I have learned about DARPA  and discovered that some of the early work on what is now the internet was carried out at UCLA at about the time I was there.  It has occurred to me that I may have sent one of the world's first emails. About 15 years later I was definitely sending and receiving emails because I had subscribed to Telecom Gold . I had installed a dedicated telephone line to my chambers at 72 Bridge Street in Manchester and bought a dial-up modem which I connected to my Amstrad 8256  computer.  The modem was very...

Prof. Tanya Aplin I have been a fan of Professor Tanya Aplin  for some time, originally because of her transformation of Gurry on Breach of Confidence  and more recently because of her part in the Submission to the UK IPO on the issue of criminal sanctions for the deliberate copying of designs  by Sir Robin Jacob and the Professors of IP law at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bournemouth. Like Francis Gurry , the Director-General of the WIPO, she is an Australian which is almost a qualification in itself as the courts of that island continent are a laboratory for the development of the common law positively fizzing with bright ideas some good and others not so good. Professor Aplin was guest of honour at the Intellectual Property Bar Association garden party on Monday which I attended with Robert Griffiths QC , the IPBA's latest recruit, and our pupil Nicola Strachan . Before we could taste our pudding metaphorically speak...

In his acceptance speech, Francis Gurry, the new Director-General of the WIPO, addressed " the question of how intellectual property can contribute to the reduction of the knowledge gap and to greater participation on the part of the developing and least developed countries in the benefits of innovation and the knowledge economy."  A graphic illustration of just how far the World IP Organization and indeed the W O R L D have to go to achieve that end is provided by Worldmapper , a multidisciplinary team of mainly Sheffield academics  led by Professor Danny Dorling .  They have a whole load of interesting maps one of which on the relative economic decline of the British Isles has already been blogged by BBC correspondent Mark Easton. However the map that impressed me (and one which perhaps explains the reason for our relative decline) is the Map of Patents Granted.   North America is big as one would expect it to be but Japan appears on the map to be even bigger. Half way be...

I am no sycophant but I am genuinely delighted that Francis Gurry has got the top job at the WIPO .   I first heard of Gurry 20 years ago when I read his book on Breach of Confidence   which is to my mind one of the best books on the subject. It was published by Clarendon in 1984 but for some inexplicable reason it does not appear ever to have been reprinted.   I still refer to it from time to time.    In 1992  I actually met Gurry at a seminar on IP arbitration which was organized by the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Several things sprang from that seminar. Peter Ford set up an arbitration panel for the Patents County Court led by Professor Bryan Niblett which he asked me to join. Sadly, I never got any appointments but I don't think anybody else on the panel did either. Secondly, the WIPO set up the Arbitration and Mediation Centre.   The Centre was one of the first domain dispute resolution providers and having handled many thousands of domain name disputes it is arguably ...