My daily runs - interrupted by a chest infection in recent weeks, but now restarted - often take me past the Harwell Campus, which must be one of the most important concentrations of technology businesses in the country. During the pandemic, the government funded the building of a production facility for vaccines - then sold it off to a private company (as reported here by the BBC). The government denies that it sold it, claiming that it was never the government's property anyway, but it was certainly paid for with public money and the non-profit company that did actually own it should surely ..read more

Once, Silent Witness was one of the better crime dramas on television, but as some point a few years ago (after changes to the cast had already made it a shadow of its original self) it seemed to lose its connection to reality. I have not watched it for many years now, and the claim that an episode infringed copyright in an earlier screenplay made me wonder whether claiming even such an association with the show wouldn’t be detrimental to the purported author’s reputation. But there you are – that’s probably just me being a grumpy old man. Molavi v Gilbert & Ors [2023] EWHC 646 (Ch) (23 ..read more

 Australia has phased out its innovation patent system, following legislative changes to the Patents Act 1990 (Cth).  The final day for filing a new Australian innovation patent is 25 August 2021. The relevant amending provisions of the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 2 and Other Measures) Act 2020 (Cth) commence from 26 August 2021 - 18 months after the Act received royal assent. What is (or was) an Innovation Patent? The innovation patent was conceived as a simpler, faster, and more economical, form of protection for inventions compa ..read more

 The idea that the TRIPS agreement should be waived (just a little) to remove IP protection from Covid vaccines, first raised by India and South Africa a few weeks ago, has new momentum following publication of an open letter signed by “over 100 international IP academics” supporting the intiative. The list contains some well-known names (well-known, that is, to IP practitioners and students) although a couple that are missing are perhaps even more significant (I leave you to work out who they might be). You can read the text here and my friend Mark Anderson's take on it here. He is not c ..read more

The Unified Patent Court, which will bring much-needed consistency to patent litigation in Europe (but which the UK will do without), has already faced problems in Germany once: back in March 2017 it was approved by the Bundestag but not by the right majority, so the decision was declared void. Then the UK dropped out (initially after the referendum the UK government, in an excess of "cakeism", announced that it would still participate although no-one could quite see how that would work, but then someone noticed that the Court of Justice had a role to play in the new system and it suddenly bec ..read more

The UK government has launched a consultation on the future regime for the exhaustion of IP rights. The consultation is open for responses from 7 June to 31 August 2021. It is going to be a crucial decision which would significantly impact IP owners, consumers, and others involved and affected by parallel trade.  IP rights give economic incentives for creations, products and innovations of new technology, enabling rights owners to benefit from the information and intellectual goods created. Consumers benefit from the availability of a wider range of innovative or attractive goods. But mov ..read more

 The government recently announced a post-implementation review of the changes made to s.72 five years ago. S.72 creates what the government (though the IPO) tells us is "an exception to copyright infringement" though I insist (especially to students) that it is a permitted act. If the legislation uses that terminology, why should we call it something different? It has the effect of an exception to copyright infringement, but calling it by that name is sloppy. Anyway, that section (should you need a reminder) permits free showing of a broadcast, and certain copyright elements that go with ..read more

When a patent is held to be invalid for want of novelty or inventiveness, a party which has suffered loss by being denied access to cheaper products cannot get damages on the basis that their loss was caused by unlawful means. In Secretary of State for Health v Servier Laboratories Ltd, where the loss arose because there were no generic equivalents of the invalidly-patented drug, the Supreme Court held that the "dealing requirement" laid down in OBG Ltd v Allan [2008] 1 AC 1, which states that the unlawful means should have affected the third party’s freedom to deal with the claimant, is a nec ..read more

The Guardian today reports that the open-source mapping project OpenStreetMap, described as "Wikipedia-for-maps", is contemplating relocating from the UK to somewhere that is still in the EU. Although there seem to be manifold reasons, one of them (and I should have thought a pretty important one) is the fact that databases of UK origin will no longer enjoy protection in EU27. What we know (and possibly love) as database right in the UK is, of course, a creature of EU law. Actually, it's old enough to be EC law: Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 96/9/EC on the legal prote ..read more

In an action for infringement of the trade mark CRYPTOBACK (Wirex Ltd v Cryptocarbon Global Ltd & Ors [2021] EWHC 617(IPEC) (16 March 2021)) the defendants argued that they had earlier rights to the name, and also that the application to register it had been made in bad faith, but acknowledged that if they lost on their counterclaim they were infringing the trade mark.   The counterclaim was therefore a slightly unusual s.5(4) claim, based on the defendants’ ability to oppose the registration because they had common law rights that, in other circumstances, would have enabled them to s ..read more