NIPC Law

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...

 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...

On 15 Nov 2011 the government announced that a new small claims service will be introduced at the Patents County Court (PCC)  with a view to helping small and medium sized businesses to protect their copyright, trade marks and designs.(see the press release "New Intellectual Property Court process will boost UK business" ). Such a service had been recommended by Jackson ( Review of Civil Litigation Costs , Final Report Dec 2009 at page 257) and Hargreaves ( "Digital Opportunity, A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth" , Final Report page 85).  Gowers had favoured a slightly different service, namely a fast track scheme for lower value IP cases though his 54th recommendation went no further than a review by the Department of  Constitutional Affairs (see page 117 of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property , June 2006). In the consultation document "Introducing a Small Claims Track into the Patents County Court"  which the Intellectual Property Off...

We have had quite a few reviews of intellectual property law recently. They include the following though I could have listed a number of others: Digital Britain Final Report in June 2009; Innovation Nation in March 2008; Gowers Review of Intellectual Property in Nov 2006; DTI Innovation Report – Competing in the Global Economy: the Innovation Challenge in Dec 2003; IPAC “The Enforcement of Patent Rights” in Nov 2003; IPAC “Patent Enforcement for SME and Lone Inventors – A System Failure” in Nov 2003; HM Treasury "Productivity in the UK: Enterprise and the Productivity Challenge" in June 2001; and William Kingston “Enforcing Small Firms’ Patent Rights ". Now we have “Digital Opportunity A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth” by Prof. Ian Hargreaves of T he Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies . Does this report say anything that has not already been said before? In my view it does. As readers will see from my comments on Innovati...