NIPC Law

Author Mike Gimelbelb Licence Copyright waived by author Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert For many years space was a government activity largely because most of the early uses of the technology were military and the vehicles that launched transported people and objects into space were developed from missiles. Gradually, civilian uses were found for the technology such as satellite broadcasting, remote sensing and telecommunications.  The value of the global space market is between £155 and £190 billion and likely to rise to £400 billion by 2030 according to the  Space Sector Report 1  which was prepared for the House of Commons Committee on Exiting the European Union. The Industrial Strategy white paper   states that   the United Kingdom has about 6.5% of that market and that the government hopes to increase that share to 10% by 2030. In order to achieve that goal the British government has to update the legal framework that regulates the ...

Jane Lambert On Wednesday I stressed the importance of pre-action correspondence and how the drafting of a letter before claim can make all the difference between getting what you want quickly and cheaply through focused negotiation and precipitating an expensive and possibly protracted law suit in  Pre-Action Correspondence - Not Just a Box to be ticked or a Hoop to be jumped through   2 Aug 2017. Today, I shall tell you what to do if you receive a letter accusing you of infringing a patent or some other intellectual property right. If you have carried out an IP audit you should have a strategy in place for just such a contingency and you will have an insurance funded legal team ready to advise and represent you.  If you have a case they should be able to see off the challenge with a well-reasoned and documented response. If, however, you are in the wrong they will advise you of that reality and suggest ways of extricating yourself from the dispute as ...

I always enjoy going to court in the Rolls Building. It is a great improvement on the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand or even the new Civil Justice Centres in Liverpool and Manchester. But this court is expensive to run which is why HM Government is about to increase the cost of issuing a claim worth over £10,000 to 5% of the value of the claim. As I say in  How to enforce your IP claim after court fees sky rocket   7 March 2014 NIPC Inventors' Club, some litigants will be faced with a whopping 622% fee increase. That falls well within the jurisdiction  of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court which was set up to make it easier for British SME to enforce their intellectual property rights. However, £10,000 is a daunting expense for many such businesses and it is likely to be one more reason for their not protecting their intellectual assets. However, there are things that an SME can do and I have set those out in my article: Limit your damages to £10...

Until the 31 March 2013 it was possible to enter a conditional fee agreement ( "CFA" ) whereby the other side would pay any success fee. Similarly, it was possible to look to the other side to pay an after-the-event  ( "ATE" ) insurance premium.   In his  Final Report  S ir Rupert Jackson  recommended that success fees and ATE insurance premiums should cease to be recoverable from unsuccessful opponents in civil litigation as those costs were "the major contributor to disproportionate costs in civil litigation in England and Wales".. S.44 (4)  and s.46 (1)  of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 which came into effect on 1 April 2013 carried those recommendations into effect.  It is, of course, still possible to enter a CFA and take out ATE insurance but any success fee or insurance premium has to be paid by the successful party out of any damages that the successful party may receive. ...

We have an adversarial system of civil litigation in England and Wales as do most other English speaking countries. In an adversarial system the parties choose the issues over which they wish to fight and produce the evidence that they want the tribunal to consider. By contrast, most of the rest of the world has an inquisitorial system where the tribunal leads an inquiry into the facts. Each system has its advantages and it is beyond the scope of this article to decide which is superior but one advantage of the inquisitorial system is that it is very much cheaper. In the New Patent County Court Rules , Why IP Yorkshire and many other articles as well as in my book Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights I referred to the IPAC report The Enforcement of Patent Rights that compared the costs of patent infringement litigation in France, Germany and the Netherlands in 2003 (between 10,000 and 50,000 euro) with the costs in England and Wales (£150,000 to £250,000 in the Patents County ...