Around the IP Blogs

 

It's Sunday, which means it is time to catch up on what happened on other IP blogs in the past week...

Think I'm just gonna
lay here all day...

Patents

The UPC Preparatory Committee has reacted with enthusiasm to the approval in the German Bundestag of the ratification legislation for the Unified Patent Court Agreement. Kluwer Patent Blog reported on this new development.

 

In his 1913 essay Totem und Taboo, Freud defined taboo as a prohibition related to what is considered sacred or impure. The famous psychoanalyst insists on the irrationality of the phenomenon. Thus, compulsory licensing, which is often seen as an impure danger, seems to be a kind of taboo for intellectual property specialists. But the numerous research studies related to COVID-19 and the need to be ready for an eventual health crisis of this type in the future invite us to try to (re)examine the question rationally: what is the real nature of the compulsory license?  Kluwer Patent Blog re(examined) this question.

 

Trade marks

Misleading invoices are already warned about on the EUIPO website. However, other recent activities have caused confusion and concern for some brand owners. This is the receipt of unsolicited offers to renew trade marks at inflated prices, which are being sent by an unregulated entity that effectively implies it has an official capacity for sending it. Marques warned about these unsolicited trade mark renewals.

 

It is not common that local Indian companies sue multinationals for infringement in India – and win. However, recently that happened in the case of Parle Agro Pvt. Ltd. v Walmart India Pvt. Ltd. and Ors. in which Parle Agro Pvt. Ltd. sued Walmart India Pvt. Ltd. and Ors. for violating its trademark/trade-dress when it launched a deceptively similar packaging and sold an apple-flavoured drink called “Fizzy Apple”. Kluwer Trademark Blog reported on the case.

 

Copyright

In the last few months of 2020 there have been further developments in Italy with regards to private and administrative enforcement against illicit distribution of copyright content over the internet. Kluwer Copyright Blog reported on these developments.

 

The legislative agenda of the past two decades – both in Europe and further afield – has been about adapting copyright to the requirements of the information society. The administrative means to make use of those new opportunities by licensing at the right source and allocating revenues to the right recipients, in a world of interactive and intertwined content, have not been harmonised at the same pace. In the copyright industries of the 21st century, metadata is the grease required to make the engine of copyright run smoothly and powerfully for the benefit of creators, copyright industries, and users alike. Kluwer Copyright Blog informed us of why metadata matters for the future of copyright.

 

Other: Artificial Intelligence

Promising results for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been the most exciting COVID-19 innovation news in the past few weeks. But while vaccines are a crucial step toward controlling this virus, it is important not to overlook the many other technological developments spurred by the pandemic. Written Description explored how the COVID-19 pandemic is proving a fertile ground for the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in medicine.