Intellectual property rights are territorial by nature. Copyright holders cannot yet obtain unitary protection throughout the world. Instead, they obtain rights in Australia, Brazil, China, France, South Africa, and the United States. What type of rights they obtain, how strong these rights will be, and whether the rights will be effectively enforced depend largely on […]
The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Neelie Kroes at the 2012 Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit, hosted by The Lisbon Council in Brussels.
On Thursday, September 13, 2012, the European Parliament adopted a new directive stating that cinematographic and audiovisual works as well as phonograms that are protected by copyright but whose rights holders cannot be found could be made available to the public across the EU.
Although not as exciting as a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the latest trademark case involving undergarment company Fruit of the Loom has grabbed the trademark world’s attention.
“Six surfaces being geometrically arranged in three pairs of parallel surfaces, with each pair being arranged perpendicularly to the other two pairs characterised by: (i) any two adjacent surfaces having different colours and (ii) each such surface having a grid structure formed by black borders dividing the surface into nine equal segments”.
As has already been widely reported, on Friday 29 June 2012 the European Council agreed on what has been presented as the final step on the long road to the Unitary EU Patent and a Unified European Patent Court.
While North American IP enthusiasts had likely been pre-occupied with the controversy surrounding the stalled American anti-internet piracy bills known as SOPA and PIPA (covered by IP Osgoode here), Europe has been struggling to deal with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Even though it was designed to be an international framework for improved intellectual property […]
In the past few years, policymakers, academic commentators, consumer advocates, civil liberties groups, and user communities have expressed grave concerns about the steadily increasing levels of enforcement of intellectual property rights. Many of these concerns relate to the “alphabet soup” of transborder intellectual property enforcement, which consists of the following: SECURE (Standards to Be Employed […]
In November 2011, the Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Yves Bot, issued an influential but non-binding legal opinion, positing that the functional aspects of computer programs should not be protected under copyright law. To do so would be against the interests of fair dealing, by preventing decompilation and reverse engineering, among other […]
The copyright and patent dispute between Oracle and Google continues, however a partial verdict on the copyright side of the debate has been handed down.