NIPC Law

Chartreuse Author Jarv Licence Free Art Licence  Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Patents subsist for 20 years, copyrights for the life of the author plus 70 years but the obligation neither to disclose nor make use of business or technical information that is disclosed in confidence can last indefinitely.  The recipe for Chartreuse is a case in point.  That distinctive liqueur has been emulated and occasionally counterfeited but never replicated. All members of the World Trade Organization are obliged to protect undisclosed information from unauthorized use and disclosure by art 39 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ("TRIPS") but different countries including different EU member states discharge that obligation in different ways. Such differences affect the functioning of the internal market.  To minimize those differences the European Council adopted the trade secrets directive (Dir...

Site of the London Section and UK Division of the Unified Patent Court Aldgate Tower | Location Flythrough from J2 Agency on Vimeo . On 28 Jan 2016 I shall give a talk to the CIPA Merseyside Meeting  entitled Preparing for the UPC. I will give another presentation in my chambers on 4 Feb 2016 entitled  Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court . The reason I shall give those talks is that the Unified Patent Court  ( "the UPC" ) is likely to come into being in the next few months which will in turn enable the European Patent Office  to grant its first European patents with unitary effect ( "unitary patents" ) for the territories of those countries that ratify the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court of 19 Feb 2013 ( "the UPC Agreement" ), When will the UPC come into being? Art 89 (1) of the UPC Agreement provides that it will come into force: "on 1 January 2014 or on the first day of the fourth month after the deposit of the thirteenth inst...