NIPC Law

German Federal Supreme Court Source Wikipedia On one of the hottest days of the year so far members of the Intellectual Property Bar Associaiton  gathered in the Pension Room of Gray's Inn to hear a presentation on German copyright law by Prof Ansgar Ohly . The title of his talk was Birthday Train or Eurostar which cleverly summed up the subject matter in a nutshell. The   Birthday Train is the name of a case before the German Federal Supreme Court in which the Court relaxed the originality requirement for the subsistence of copyright in works that could be protected by design registration in order to give effect to the Designs Directive (Directive 98/71/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 October 1998 on the legal protection of designs). The case reference is  Urteil vom 13. November 2013 - I ZR 143/12 - Geburtstagszug   and there is a summary of the case here. The reference to Eurostar was an allusion to that Direct...

Jane Lambert S.39 (1) of the Patents Act 1977 provides: "Notwithstanding anything in any rule of law, an invention made by an employee shall, as between him and his employer, be taken to belong to his employer for the purposes of this Act and all other purposes if - (a) it was made in the course of the normal duties of the employee or in the course of duties falling outside his normal duties, but specifically assigned to him, and the circumstances in either case were such that an invention might reasonably be expected to result from the carrying out of his duties; or (b) the invention was made in the course of the duties of the employee and, at the time of making the invention, because of the nature of his duties and the particular responsibilities arising from the nature of his duties he had a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's undertaking." S.39 (2) provides that any other invention made by an employee shall, as between him...

As I said in How the Intellectual Property Act 2014 changes British Patent Law   21 June 2014 JD Supra, the most important provision of the Intellectual Property Act 2014  is s.17  which inserts a new s.88A into the Patents Act 1977. That section confers power on the Secretary of State to make provision in the UK for the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court . Why is that agreement important? It is because art 1 establishes a court common to almost all the countries of the European Union including the UK for the settlement of disputes relating to European patents and European patents with unitary effect ("Unitary patents").  That court will be known as the Unified Patent Court ("UPC") and it will consist of a Court of First Instance and a Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal will sit in Luxembourg but the Court of First Instance will have a central division with Paris with sections in London and Munich. In addition there will be regional and local divisi...

Although some such as George Monbiot do not approve of it (see "This transatlantic trade deal is a full-frontal assault on democracy" 4 Nov 2013 The Guardian ) and many quite politically aware people are not even aware of it, negotiators from the United States and European Union have been hammering out a deal to create a North Atlantic Free Trade Area. If they succeed they will create a market of 800 million of the richest consumers on earth which should increase the GDP of all the countries in the arrangement enormously. An early discussion draft can be inspected here  and news of the latest negotiations can be gleaned from the press conference above. One of the reasons why Mr Monbiot does not like the deal is that disputes between businesses and governments will be determined not by the Court of Justice of the European Union or a national court but by arbitration as happens already under Chapter II of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a large number of bil...

The Intellectual Property Bill has passed through the Commons and now awaits royal assent. Although much attention has focused on clause 13 of the Bill which will create a new offence of unauthorized copying of a registered or registered Community design in the course of business the legislation makes a number of useful changes to registered and unregistered designs and patents law. I have written a number of articles on the Bill for this blog: "The Intellectual Property Bill" 26 May 2013 "Correspondence with my MP on Clause 13 of the Intellectual Property Bill"  29 May 2013, and "Clause 13 of the Intellectual Property Bill will probably go through. What next?"  20 Dec 2013. I also made written submissions on the Bill as it passed through committee in the House of Commons. My colleague, Thomas Dillon, has also analysed the Bill though he has tended to welcome clause 13 (see Thomas Dillon "UK: Intellectual Property Bill"  28...

In Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd v. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer International Holdings Inc and Others   [2007] Bus LR 1796, [2007] BusLR 1796, [2008] 1 All ER 425, [2007] UKHL 43 Lord Hoffmann described s.7 (2) and (3) of the Patents Act 1977  as "an exhaustive code for determining who is entitled to the grant of a patent." For determining entitlement to the grant maybe because s.32 (3) of the Act provides that "Notwithstanding anything in subsection (2)(b) above, no notice of any trust, whether express, implied or constructive, shall be entered in the register and the comptroller shall not be affected by any such notice."  But not necessarily to ownership because s.30 (1) states that patents and patent applications are personal property and sub-section (3) adds that they may vest by operation of law in the same way as any other personal property. `Disputes over equitable interests in patents or patent applications are fairly rare but they can arose in cir...

Jane Lambert In Cosmetic Warriors Ltd and Another v amazon.co.uk Ltd and Another [2014] EWHC 181 Mr John Baldwin QC, sitting as a judge of the High Court, had to decide whether causing advertising  to appear on an an Internet user's screen for products that competed with those of the claimants whenever  the user entered the claimants' trade mark into a search box amounted to an infringement of the claimants' mark. The Parties The claimants ( "Lush" ) manufacture and supply cosmetics under the Lush brand. They are well known for their colourful soaps and bath bombs.   The first named claimant is the registered proprietor, and the second its licensee, of Community trade mark number 01388313  ( "the CTM" ) under which the word LUSH is registered for "Perfumes; bath preparations; non-medicated toilet preparations; cosmetic preparations; lotions, powders and creams all for use on the skin; dentifrices; depilatory preparations; de...

The Royal Mail's Privatization was too cautious according to the National Audit Office. Will Vince Cable ask too much for the shares of IPO Plc? Ever since the announcement by Viscount Younger of Leckie  that the Intellectual Property Office  is to be privatized, there has been intense speculation in the City as to what the price that the shares will be offered to the public upon the agency's privatization. Originally it was rumoured that the price would be 255p but following the National Audit Office's criticism of the Royal Mail Privatization  analysts now believe that it could be set very much higher. A figure of 375p has been suggested by some analysts, especially after the IPO's staff received tempting offers from the Bogof hedge fund. According to the South Wales Argus  and the Western Mail there has been a rush of enquiries for top of the range models at Sytner the luxury car distributor for Newport.  Jewellers and pubs in the ...

In  Magmatic Ltd v PMS International Ltd [2013] EWHC 1925 (Pat) (11 July 2013) Mr Justice Arnold held that PMS International Ltd ( "PMS" ) had infringed registered Community design number 43427-0001 ( "the RCD" ), some of Magmatic Ltd ( "Magmatic" )'s design rights and Magmatic's literary copyright in its safety notice. Magmatic appealed to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the judge fell into error in finding infringement of the RCD in that he had wrongly interpreted the RCD and improperly excluded from his consideration various aspects of the design of Magimax's product. In  Magmatic Ltd v PMS International Ltd [2014] EWCA Civ 181 (28 Feb 2014) the Court of Appeal (Lords Justices Moses and Kitchin and Lady Justice Black) allowed the appeal. The Parties Magamatic makes and sells ride-on suitcases for children under the trade mark  Trunki.  Photographs of one of the products in the Trunki range appe...

Two interesting points arose in  British Shorinji Kempo Federation v Shorinji Kempo Unity   [2014] EWHC 285 (Ch) (17 Feb 2014) in which my colleague Thomas Dillon  appeared for the  British Shorinji Kempo Foundation ("BSKF")  on a pro bono basis. The first was what constitutes genuine use for the purpose of s.6A of the Trade Marks Act 1994 . The second was the methodology by which the judge determined whether the mark that had BSKF sought to register was similar to one that had previously been registered by Shorinji Kempo Unity ("SKU") and if so whether there was any likelihood of confusion for the purposes of s.5 (2) of the Act. The Parties SKU is an entity whose function is to hold the intellectual property rights of the World Shorinji Kempo Organisation ("WSKO") . WKSO had many branches or affiliated organizations around the world. According to WSKO's website, Shorinji Kempo is a Japanese martial art founded in the town of Tadotsu in 1947. The B...