NIPC Law

Supreme Court of the United Kingdom Author Kelsey Farish Licence CC BY 4,0   Source Wikimedia Commons   J ane Lambert Supreme Court (Lord Briggs, Lord Hamblen, Lord Leggatt, Lord Stephens, and Lord Kitchin) Emotional Perception AI Ltd. v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks   [2026] UKSC 3 This was an appeal by Emotional Appeal AI Limited ("the applicant") against the Court of Appeal's decision in  Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks   [2024] Bus LR 14, [2023] WLR(D) 500, [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch) (21 Nov 2023) to uphold the examiner's objection to the patentability of the applicant's invention. I discussed the Court of Appeal's reasoning in  Patents - the Appeal in Comptroller v Emotional Perceptions   on 26 Aug 2024. The Invention The applicant applied to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office for a patent for a method of training a neural network to reflect emotional perc...

Jane Lambert   Chancery Division (Mrs Justice Joanna Smith) Getty Images (US) Inc and others v Stability AI Ltd (Rev1) [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) (4 Nov 2025) I first mentioned this litigation in Copyright and Artificial Intelligence - Getty Images (US) Inc and others v Stability AI Ltd . on 12 Dec 2023. In that article, I discussed an unsuccessful application by Stability AI Ltd ("Stability") to strike out the claim by Getty Images (US) Inc. and others ("Getty") for copyright, database right and trade mark infringement and passing off under  CPR Part 24 and CPR 3.4  in  Getty Images (US) Inc and others v Stability AI Lt d [2023] EWHC 3090 (Ch) (1 Dec 2023).   Getty had alleged that Stability had scraped millions of high-quality photographic images of such subjects as world events, sporting moments, celebrities, architecture, nature and travel created by hundreds of thousands of photographers over many years and in which copyright was likely to subsis...

Nucleus of 103P/Hartley as imaged during a spacecraft flyby Author NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD  Licence Public Domain  Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Patents Court (Michael Tappin KC)  Thaler v The Comptroller -General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2025] EWHC 2202 (Ch) (1 Sept 2025) DABUS stands for "Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience".  According to its creator, Stephen Thaler , DABUS invented a new kind of food or beverage container and a new kind of light beacon and a new way of attracting attention in an emergency. Dr Thaler has tried to obtain patents for DABUS's inventions but he has not had much success outside South Africa. That is because most of the world's intellectual property offices , including our own, require an inventor to be a natural person.  I have written a lot of articles about DABUS and Dr Thaler's patent applications.  Readers are referred to Artificial Intelligence -The DABUS Decisions ,...