NIPC Law

Jane Lambert   Business and Property Courts of England and Wales, Intellectual Property (Sir Colin Birss, Chancellor) QMC Instruments Ltd v Celtic Terahertz Technology Ltd and others [2025] EWHC 3485 (IPEC) (26 Nov 2025) This was a dispute between two university spin-off companies, which were incorporated to exploit the work of Professor Peter Ade .  Professor Ade carried out research into the far-infrared spectrum first at  Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University London)  until 2001 and afterwards at Cardiff University . While at Queen Mary, he helped to set up QMC Instruments Ltd.  ("QMCIL") to sell far-infrared detectors and multimesh filters, some of which he had designed.  Some years later, Professor Ade and colleagues who had followed him to Cardiff established Celtic Terahertz Technology Ltd  ("CTT"). QMCIL Queen Mary College sold QMCILto investors in 1991 and warranted that the company was the sole beneficial owner of all the IP relatin...

Jane Lambert A press release issued by the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts caught my eye with the headline "Designer Courts" . It referred to a cooperation agreement between the Dubai Design and Fashion Council and the Dubai Dispute Resolution Authority which was signed on 15 March 2017 "to pave the way for wider adoption of the English language, international law courts system by Dubai’s fast-developing design and fashion sector."    More

Jane Lambert Today is World Intellectual Property Day . It commemorates the day on which the day in 1970 on which the  Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization  ("WIPO") came into force. Since the day has been marked by events around the world to promote awareness of intellectual property . Most of those events follow a common theme.  This year's theme is  Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity .  The WIPO website explains: "Every day women come up with game-changing inventions and life-enhancing creations that transform lives and advance human understanding from astrophysics to nanotechnology and from medicine to artificial intelligence and robotics. And in the creative sphere, whether in the movies, animation, music, fashion, design, sculpture, dance, literature, art and more, women are re-imagining culture, testing the limits of artistry and creative expression, drawing us into new worlds of experie...

Manchester Civil Justice Centre Author Skip88 Licence  Copyright waived by the author Source  Wikipedia Jane Lambert According to TaylorWessing's Patent Map , England and Wales remains the most expensive country in Europe in which to contest a patent action. The European Patent Office reports that the UK lay 9th in the number of European patent applications that were filed in 2017 trailing not just the USA, Japan, China and Germany which are considerably bigger in population and GDP than the UK but France, South Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands that are the same size or smaller (see  European patent filings per country of origin ). It seems likely that the UK's relatively lacklustre performance in the number of European patent applications is connected to the high cost of enforcement.  I have plenty of anecdotal evidence from my practice, patent clinics and inventors' clubs to support that contention. One of the reason...

Jane Lambert In anticipation of our departure from the European Union. Her Majesty's government and businesses in the United Kingdom have been exploring the possibility of developing new markets for British goods and services overseas. Only this week, the Prime Minister visited Saudi Arabia and Jordan (see  Prime Minister's visit to Saudi Arabia and Jordan: April 2017   4 April 2017 HMG's website) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was in India as part of the 9th UK-India Economic and Financial Dialogue (see  UK-India economic and trade relations to take centre stage on two-day visit   4 April 2017 HMG's website). One of the advantages of trading within the EU is that the legal systems of the member states have been harmonized over the years and supplemented with a growing body of Union law. This is as true of intellectual property  as of everything else with the result that the legal protection of intellectual assets  in any of the...

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...

As I indicated in  How the Intellectual Property Act 2014 changes British Patent Law   JD Supra 21 June 2014 s.16 of the Intellectual Property Act 2014 amends s.74A and s.74B of the Patents Act 1977 and inserts three new subsections into s.73. The upshot as explained in paragraph 4  and paragraph 5  of the IPO's guide Expansion of the Patent Opinions Service: business guidance is that the range of questions upon which an examiner's opinion can be obtained has been expanded and the Comptroller now has power to revoke patents which are found to be invalid. Where to find the Law The Patents Act 1977 has now been amended by art 3 and the Schedule  to The Intellectual Property Act 2014 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Order 2014 (SI 2014 No 2330) (see Jane Lambert  The Intellectual Property Act 2014 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Order 2014   6 Sept 2014) and corresponding changes to the Paten...

 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...

As everyone knows, copyright restricts the acts listed in s.16 (1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988  ( "CDPA" ) in relation to a work in which copyright subsists ( "a copyright work" ). Those acts include copying, issuing copies, renting, lending or communicating the work to the public etc. Anyone who does any of those acts without the owner's licence  infringes that copyright. He or she may be sued or in an extreme case prosecuted. Clearly, if you want to broadcast, perform or otherwise make use of a copyright work it is a good idea to get a licence. As all those lovely artists, choreographers, composers. dramatists, novelists, poets, song writers and other authors need to live it is only right that they get paid a reasonable fee for their trouble. But therein lies the rub because what may seem reasonable to you and me as consumers may not feel reasonable to an artist in his garret or, more importantly, his agent in his BMW. As I argued...

"So what is intellectual property ?" That is a question that I have been asked many times. By accountants and bank managers, clerks of factory chambers, instructing solicitors and even by fellow members of the Bar. Well now the Court of Appeal has provided an answer of sorts.   In  Coogan v News Group Newspapers Ltd and Another [2012] EWCA Civ 48 (1 Feb 2012) the question was whether mobile telephone voice mail messages were "intellectual property" for the purpose of s.72 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 and the Court of Appeal held that they were. The question arose in the context of the privilege against self-incrimination. Unlike the United States which safeguards this privilege by the Fifth Amendment of its Constitution, it subsists at common law (see Blunt v Park Lane Hotel Ltd [1942] 2 KB 253) and is reinforced by s.14 of the Civil Evidence Act 1968. But there are loads of exceptions to this rule as the Master of the Rolls noted at paragraph [16] of his ...