Events 2024

Patent Law – Fit for an (emotional) AI age?: CIIs, Training ANNs and other stories

4 December 2024

It is generally accepted that ‘modern’ UK patent law took root in the (first) steam-driven industrial revolution of the 18th century. On the whole, the basic tenets of patent law established back then seemed to flex and so weather the next two industrial revolutions that followed.

But now, as we find ourselves in what is dubbed ‘4IR’ or ‘Industry 4.0’, speculation abounds over the suitability of current patent law in an AI-driven world. Ahead of stakeholder consultations, the previous UK government acknowledged that patent law might need revision in order to ‘unleash the transformational power of Artificial Intelligence’, but what is the optimal patent protection for AI systems and AI-assisted inventions? And how different might it look from the status quo?

At a conference, entitled ‘AI Frontiers in Intellectual Property Law: Navigating the Future’ held at QMIPIR, a neighbouring institution, earlier this year, Lord Justice Richard Arnold identified a number of basic issues that patent law and policy should look to address, including:

• What activities does patent law need to incentivise, and where should the balance be struck if aiming to motivate technical innovation by applicants and to encourage public disclosure of inventions (to stimulate innovation by others)?
• How does the requirement of public disclosure work if an invention is made by machine learning (perhaps using non-public data), and how important is it?
• If we try to fit AI-generated inventions into the existing system, how will patent requirements, such as inventive step and sufficiency be applied?

These questions served as the spring board to initiate a much-needed debate on this important area. 

Speakers

• Virginia Driver, CPA, EPA, Page White Farrer
• Matt Hervey, Head of Legal and Policy at Human Native AI, General Editor of The Law of Artificial Intelligence
• Michael Prior, Deputy Director of Patents Policy, UKIPO
• Professor Noam Shemtov, Queen Mary University of London

Chair: Carter Eltzroth, Legal Director, DVB

Find out more about the event here, or or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.

UK Trade Marks Act 1994 at 30 - Going Forward, Looking Backwards: Lessons from Harmonisation 

7 November 2024 

Think back to 1994. A year when Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s new president, a company called Amazon establishes an online marketplace for books, the first Eurostar train travels to France through the Channel Tunnel, the Sony PlayStation is launched, cinema-goers queue to watch The Lion King, Pulp Fiction and Four Weddings and a Funeral; D:Ream’s ‘Things can only get better’ tops the UK Singles Chart.
 
On 21 July of that year, the UK Trade Marks Act 1994 also received Royal assent, replacing the 1938 legislation. As the (then) new Act’s long title explains, its core rationale is ‘to make new provision for registered trade marks implementing Council Directive No. 89/104/EEC of 21st December 1988 to approximate the laws of the Member States relating to trade marks’ and ‘in connection with Council Regulation (EC) No. 40/94 of 20th December 1993 on the Community trade mark’. The UK had been an active participant in discussions that led to the Directive and Regulation, appreciating the need for modernisation and seeing value in the increased efficiencies for business brought about by greater harmonisation with our nearest neighbours.
 
Fast forward to 2024, and in the UK, those harmonisation aims now seem to be disappearing in the rear-view mirror. This event marks the milestone of the 30th anniversary of the Trade Marks Act 1994. It will reflect on the UK’s interaction with the EU trade mark system and CJEU jurisprudence over the last 30 years, and consider how this is might, or perhaps should, continue to influence the development of UK trade mark law in the next 30 years. 

Speakers

• Professor Robert Burrell, University of Oxford
• Geoffrey Hobbs KC, One Essex Court
• Professor Annette Kur, Max Planck Institute
• Kelly Saliger, President of CITMA

Chair: Lord Justice Richard Arnold, Royal Courts of Justice

Find out more about the event here, read the CITMA report on the event here, or or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.

10x Genomics v Nanostring: How are Novelty and Inventive Step to be Assessed? First lessons from the UPC Court of Appeal

 12 June 2024

On 26 February 2024, the UPC Court of Appeal issued its first decision in which it overturned a first-instance preliminary injunction issued by the Court of First Instance (Munich Local Division). The patent in suit relates to a method for detecting a plurality of analytes in a cell or tissue sample and is one of the first patents with unitary effect, the grant of had only been published by the EPO on 7 June 2023. With the annulled decision, the Local Division had issued a preliminary injunction based on this patent for 17 UPCA member states. In its judgement, the patent was not only infringed but also more likely than not valid, and the balance of the parties’ interests weighed in favour of preliminary injunctive relief. The Court of Appeal overturned this decision. The decisive factor for this was a partially different interpretation of the patent claim and a quite different assessment of the inventive step.

How the patentability of an invention is examined and assessed is primarily determined in Europe by the case law of the EPO Boards of Appeal. However, national courts, in particular UK and German courts, have in some cases developed their own and differing standards. Against this background, the lecture will deal in particular with the question of how the Court of Appeal methodically approached the construction of the patent claim by the Local Division, the assessment of the novelty of the subject matter of this claim and the question of whether the invention was obvious to the skilled person.

Speaker: Professor Peter Meier-Beck

Find out more about the event here, or or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

Patents in Telecoms and the Internet of Things 2024

16-17 May 2024

In May, IBIL hosted the 7th Patents in Telecoms and the Internet of Things Conference at Senate House, London. We are told that by attendees that it is one of the best (the best) conference of its kind. In view of its reputation, IBIL was able to secure over 40 speakers including the key decision-makers in this field (including the leading first instance and appeal judges of courts in the UK, Europe and the US), the most engaged academics, the main policy-makers/legislation drafters from the EU Commission, UK and US Governments, specialist economists/think-tankers as well as representatives from almost all of the leading companies and law firms. This year, there were over 150 delegates registered for the two day, with others joining online.

For more details, see the full conference programme.

Copyright and Generative AI: Putting input issues under the spotlight

20 March 2024

Generative AI, as a topic, is everywhere. From a copyright law perspective, much attention has been directed towards whether the outputs of generative AI do, or should, enjoy copyright protection. While the output and input issues are inevitably linked, the focus has firmly shifted to the legal implications of the process involved in training these systems. Generative AI systems are reliant upon huge datasets of existing materials, whether text, music or artwork – often copyright-protected works – and typically harvested without the copyright holders’ knowledge or permission. Is this training activity plain infringement, or a permitted use which should be exempted?

Litigation is on foot in numerous jurisdictions, and these ongoing disputes may provide some much-needed answers in 2024. At the same time, many IP Offices around the world are engaged in stakeholder consultations, striving to find the ‘right’ balance of copyright protection which respects the rights and interests of human creators while not dampening innovation in the burgeoning AI sector. This event delved into the fascinating world of Generative AI to paint a clearer picture of the specific copyright challenges that this rapidly evolving technological landscape presents, and  explore the role that copyright law should play in mediating between the AI technologists and the creative industries.

Chair: Professor Tania Aplin (Kings College London)

• Dr Ana Ramalho, Copyright Counsel at Google
• Dr João Pedro Quintais, Assistant Professor at IViR (Institute for Information Law), University of Amsterdam  
• Toby Headdon, Bristows LLP.

 Find out more about the event here, or or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

AI-Enabled Crime - The Annual Privacy Lecture

19 March 2024

About the talk

Defending against cyber attacks is a never-ending race. Generative AI is changing cybercrime in the form of deepfakes, automated phishing at scale and region-free scams. Next, we’re likely to see fully automated malware campaigns, using machine learning. Most cyber security systems already heavily use AI. Once the attackers migrate to AI, attack and defense online will become a game of a robot against a robot. What have we seen so far? And what’s going to happen next?

About the speaker

Mikko Hyppönen is one of the most recognized cyber security experts world-wide, a TED speaker and a best-selling author. Mikko works as the Chief Research Officer for WithSecure in Finland and sits on the advisory boards of EUROPOL and Verge Motorcycles. He has written for the New York Times, Wired and Scientific American, and his latest book has been translated to 5 languages.

Find out more about the event here, or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

Question the Trade Mark Judges

15 March 2024

IBIL and MARQUES, the European Association of Trade Mark Owners, invited you to meet and question some of the judges that are deciding our trade mark disputes. The Chair, The Rt Hon Professor Sir Robin Jacob, posed a set of pre-selected questions from the audience to:

• Virginia Melgar – Chairperson of the 5th Board of Appeal, EUIPO
• The Honourable Mr Justice Mellor – High Court
• Douglas Campbell KC - Deputy High Court Judge, Civil Recorder and Crime Recorder on the South Eastern Circuit
• Allan James - Senior Hearing Officer and former Head of Trade Mark Tribunal, UKIPO.

Find out more about the event here, read the MARQUES event report here, or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

The Battle of the Booksellers: the 250th anniversary of Donaldson v Beckett

27 February 2024

About this talk

The Stationers’ Company played a pivotal role in the enactment of the world’s first copyright legislation in 1710 which is known simply as ‘the Statute of Anne’. Yet, the case of Donaldson v Beckett (1774) was a significant landmark in the protection of literary works and equally deserving of attention as we reach its 250th anniversary in February 2024.

Although the new copyright act provided a monopoly for up to 28 years, London’s publishers then faced unwelcome competition from Scottish printers, whose trade was largely built upon the re-printing English books, once the statutory protection expired. A thirty-year campaign of litigation ensued – the ‘Battle of the Booksellers’. The London publishers seemed to have triumphed. They persuaded the English courts that the fixed term protection of the Statue of Anne merely supplemented the perpetual ‘common law’ protection that a first publisher already enjoyed. The copyright legislation could have become an irrelevance, but then Donaldson v Beckett turned the tide.

Following a hearing in February 1774, the House of Lords ruled that a Scottish printer, Alexander Donaldson, was entitled to print James Thomson’s The Seasons without requiring Beckett’s permission. The Lords put paid to any notion of ‘common law’ rights in published works. In doing so, they not only underlined that copyright protection is entirely a creature of statute but reminded that its rationale was not to further the commercial interests of publishers (or even authors) but to reflect broader societal goals, such as the ‘encouragement of learning’.

Now, 250 years later, have these lesson been forgotten? The term and scope of copyright protect seems to increase with each new piece of legislation. Have we returned to ‘perpetual’ copyright again in all but name? While the battles between booksellers may now be confined to history, the debate as to the proper balance between copyright holders and users is far from over. Technological developments continue to place the current law under strain. As the UKIPO consults on how much unauthorised ‘text and data mining’ copyright holders must tolerate, AI is only one in a long line of threats that now publishers face.

To mark the historic anniversary of Donaldson v Beckett, the UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law joined forces with The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers (‘The Stationers’ Company’) to assemble a distinguished panel to reflect on Donaldson, its aftermath and debate how much, or perhaps how little, the copyright challenges for publishers have changed.

The Speakers

Welcome: Tony Mash, Master Stationer

Panel: Professor Hector MacQueen CBE (University of Edinburgh); Catriona MacLeod Stevenson  (Publishers Association); and Jaani Riordan (Stationer and a barrister at 8 New Square Chambers)

Chair: Professor Sir Robin Jacob (UCL IBIL)

Find out more about the event here, or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

Thinking Clearly about Trade Mark Clutter 

7 February 2024

About this talk

The number of trade mark applications filed each year remains on an upward curve. Once registered, trade marks can stay on the register indefinitely, providing the renewal fees are paid. While some marks will be revoked and others will expire, the rate of removal of marks will never keep pace with new registrations, so the stock of registered marks keeps growing year on year. The trade mark registers around the world are becoming cluttered.

Few contest that trade mark cluttering undermines the effectiveness of a trade mark registration system, but gauging the true nature and impact of clutter is challenging. And even if there is a problem, it is unclear what measures can be put in place to tackle the issue effectively. Has the system swung the balance too far in favour of applicants and owners? Are registry fee structures and practices unwittingly encouraging applicants to frame their applications too broadly and for more goods and services than they really need? The UK Supreme Court’s long awaited decision in SkyKick UK Ltd v Sky Ltd will have the final say of when and to what extent that filing an application with an overbroad specification of goods and services is made in ‘bad faith’.

The Speakers

• Alicia Chantrey, Associate General Counsel, Intellectual Property – Associated British Foods plc
• Professor Dev Gangjee, University of Oxford
• Dr Georg von Graevenitz, Queen Mary, University of London
• Andy Bartlett - Deputy CEO and Director of Services, UK Intellectual Property Office

Chair: Daniel Alexander KC

Find out more about the event here, or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

Are you Ready for REULA? 

22 January 2024

About this talk

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 (REULA) received Royal Assent in June 2023 and will enter into force on 1 January 2024. While original plans for a post-Brexit ‘bonfire of EU laws’  were abandoned, the new Act still abolishes certain now-familiar principles of EU law and introduces provisions intended to make it easier for UK courts to depart from retained EU case law (now re-branded as ‘assimilated law’). While many thousands of pieces of legislation have been saved from the end of year bonfire, the Government clearly sees REULA as the catalyst for future regulatory departure from EU laws.

This conscious uncoupling of UK and EU laws introduces uncertainty in a number of areas, including in relation to intellectual property law, which for so long have been the focus of EU harmonising efforts. Of course, with legislative uncertainty comes the risk of increased litigation, but also, perhaps, offers the UK courts and legislature a welcome opportunity to ditch aspects which just weren’t working for the UK’s IP stakeholders.

In this event, our distinguished panel will summarise the key provisions in REULA, highlight its potential implications for the main IP rights, and review the main opportunities for law reform in this area.

The Speakers

• Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society
• Professor Phillip Johnson, University of Cardiff, Barrister, Appointed Person
• Nina O’Sullivan, Mishcon de Reya LLP
• His Honour Judge James Tindal, Specialist Civil Circuit Judge, Birmingham CJC

Chair: The Rt Hon. Sir Richard Arnold, Lord Justice of Appeal

Find out more about the event here, or watch the Lecture here on our YouTube channel.  

Watch: Are you Ready for REULA?

Watch: Thinking Clearly about Trade Mark Clutter

Watch: The Battle of the Booksellers: the 250th anniversary of Donaldson v Beckett

Watch: Question the Trade Mark Judges

Watch: AI-Enabled Crime

Watch: 10x Genomics v Nanostring: First lessons from the UPC Court of Appeal

Watch: UK Trade Marks Act 1994 at 30: Going Forward, Looking Backwards

Watch: Patent Law: Fit for an (emotional) AI age?