How should digital assets be treated in terms of property? This is what the Law Commission of England and Wales has been considering in its consultation paper paper on the recognition and protection of digital assets which is open for responses until 4 November 2022. The consultation paper recommends law reform to recognise a third … Read more

The creation ("minting") and sale and use of NFTs raises many IP issues which we have discussed in our previous posts in our IP in NFTs series. However, brand owners and product manufacturers must also be vigilant in monitoring the virtual marketplaces to ensure that third parties are not creating NFTs that infringe their own IP rights.  This is especially true where the company is considering releasing or has released NFTs, because the public will begin to associate the brand with NFTs (which could include infringing NFTs).  There are several strategies that companies could adopt to minimise this risk. Read more

Creating an NFT can give rise to other IP issues, aside from questions of transfer of rights. In particular there is the issue of who in fact has the right to create and release NFTs and whether the NFT infringes third party rights. In this third of our series of NFT IP blog posts, we deal with "minting", ie the creation and sale of NFTs. Read more

As we reported in our first blog post in this series, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a new asset class that is being adopted eagerly across all sectors, raising some interesting challenges from an IP perspective. While NFTs have demonstrated themselves to be a powerful tool in the new digital era, they remain poorly understood, in particular in relation to the rights that are (or are not) transferred on purchase of an NFT. Releasing (known as "minting") and purchasing NFTs can give rise to a number of IP-related issues, such as: - Who has the right to create and release NFTs? - Does the NFT infringe third party rights? - What rights are transferred with the NFT (and on resale)? - How this rights transfer is achieved? Read more

The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published its response to its consultation on legislative changes needed to accommodate AI, stating that it has accepted the need to create a new data mining exception for copyright and database rights and that this will make it easier to analyse material for machine learning, research and innovation. The exception will apply to text and data mining for any purpose, although rights holders will still have safeguards to protect their content, including a requirement for lawful access. The Government’s decided not to introduce changes to the UK’s patent inventorship criteria or copyright computer generated works provisions at this time, although the law will be kept under review. Read more

HSF technology disputes practitioners Andrew Moir, Rachel Lidgate, Martin Hevey, Kate Macmillan, Peter Dalton, Heather Newton and Rachel Montagnon have recently published a Q&A in Practical Law on Disputes in the Technology Industry covering all aspects of disputes in the sector including current and future trends. Read more

The Supreme People’s Court of China (Supreme Court) released the Interpretation (“Interpretation”) of the Supreme Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of the Law of the People’s Republic of China against Unfair Competition (“AUCL”), which was effective on March 20, 2022. The Interpretation consists of 29 clauses in total, and, based on the revised … Read more

The UPC administration has confirmed that  it is a reasonable assessment that the start of the UPC's operations will happen during the last quarter of 2022 or early 2023. The announcement stated that: "[German ratification] will happen when the Administrative Committee is confident that the Court is operational. The German deposit will also mark the start of the sunrise period during which it will be possible to opt out existing European patents from the jurisdiction of the Court". The timing of the start of operations of the Court depends on the progress of the preparatory work. Read more