Around the IP Blogs

This Kat is ready for her close-up

Another week, another voyage around the blogs.

Copyright

International obligations for criminal liability for copyright infringement were discussed from a New Zealand angle on the Kluwer Copyright Blog, especially in relation to whether Kim Dotcom (and others) should be extradited to the US on the basis of providing a platform for copyright-infringing file sharing.

TechnoLlama considered questions of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) from a copyright perspective, taking technical issues into account.

Patents

JUVE Patent reported on the commencement in Paris of proceedings between Intellectual Ventures, an American NPE, and defendants including Bouygues and Orange over alleged infringement of a DSL technology patent in France and Germany.

Should prisoners in the US be permitted to sue in Federal Court to enforce rights in a patent? That is the question considered in a pending lawsuit, Tormasi v. Western Digital, concerning a patentee currently imprisoned in a New Jersey state prison, and covered over on PatentlyO.

In India, Natco Pharma's application for a compulsory licence - and the strategy adopted therein - for the drug Baricitinib, which is used in conjunction with Remdesivir to treat COVID-19 patients, caught the attention of Spicy IP.

Keeping to the pandemic theme, the IP Watchdog published a range of views on vaccine waivers, including a report on the US's new-found support for them, as well as an argument that IP rights are not the primary cause of the current crisis in India and a more general commentary on potential waiver-related problems. US support was also covered by outlets including PatentlyO, IP Finance, and the Kluwer Patent Blog.

FOSS Patents reported that the Court of Justice of the European Union set an August deadline for the submission of observations regarding the Düsseldorf Regional Court's Nokia v. Daimler referral on standard-essential patent licensing, thanks to a COVID-related automatic extension.

Trade marks

Class 46 shared news of a change to the Finnish Trade Names Act intended to combat the problem of overly-broad trade name registrations for extremely broad - or indeed vague - categories of business.

The conditions for fulfilment of the test for abusive practice were considered by the Kluwer Trademark Blog in relation to a recent decision of the US First Board of Appeal in the case of Sherlock Systems CV v. Apple Inc.

Photo by David Savochka from Pexels