UK-IPO issued a new Practice Note on 7 February, taking account of the judgment in Astron Clinica & Ors v The Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2008] EWHC 85 (Pat). The UK-IPO press release states: In a judgment in November 2006 in the cases of Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd (and…
Read More… from UK-IPO Change of Practice on Computer Programs
Legal Background Section 1(2) of the UK Patents Act 1977, made to correspond to Article 52(2) and (3) of the European Patent Convention (EPC),[1] excludes computer programs from being considered as being patentable inventions, but only to the extent that the patent relates to a computer program ‘as such’. This provision, and in particular how…
Read More… from Astron Clinica: Computer Program Product Claims in UK Patents
1. What is Protected Database rights are protectable under the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations (SI 1997 No 3032). A database is defined as a collection of independent works, data or other materials which are arranged in a systematic or methodical way and are individually accessible by electronic or other means. A property right (‘database…
The following details are taken from the judgment of the court. The full judgment can be accessed here. Promusicae is a non-profit-making organisation of producers and publishers of musical and audiovisual recordings. By letter of 28 November 2005 it made an application to the Juzgado de lo Mercantil No 5 de Madrid (Commercial Court No…
Read More… from ISPs and File-exchangers’ IDs: Promusicae v Telefonica
Deloitte & Touche LLP, the business advisory firm, announced on 31 January details of a survey looking at security in the consumer business industry. Key findings from the survey reveal 80% of companies do not have an information security strategy formally defined and 86% have never performed an inventory to understand where their data is…
Do intellectual property rights still provide the right framework to promote innovation and protect investment in the fast moving world of technology? This pressing question brought a packed house to Linklaters on Wednesday 23 January to hear from the experts. When Trolls Attack The first speaker was Roger Burt of IBM who tackled the tricky…
The judgment has caused great excitement in IP circles. It now appears that if companies can show that their programs made a substantive inventive contribution they may be eligible for protection regardless of the fact that such programs were distributed on a computer disc. Last year, Astron Clinica Limited (producing skin-imaging technology that enables images…
SCL is delighted that Professor Lawrence Lessig has agreed to give the SCL Lecture 2008 at the Institution of Engineering and Technology. But IT lawyers and copyright experts may be in for a shock – they will not get the familiar tour of the virtues of free software and creative commons for Professor Lessig has…
Brief but important note, via the Asociated Press: the EU Art 29 Working Party group working on privacy, DP and Internet search engines (notably Google) has issued an early press release. ‘Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated…
Read More… from Blog Taster: IP Addresses are Personal Data – Official
On 13 December 2007 Ofcom published what it described as one of the most important decisions it has ever had to make: how it will award the valuable radio spectrum that will be made available by the switch from analogue to digital television broadcasting, otherwise known as the ‘digital dividend’. Over the next few years…