Re thinking Intellectual Property Rights

The centre for Intellectual property rights, Cochin University of Science and technology, announces its third annual national workshop for law students on Re-thinking Intellectual Property Rights.


Theme for conference for 2013 scheduled from January 10th- 13, is Patents and Access to Medicine for All. Law students are required to write on any sub themes which include:

• Preserving public domains: Role of Patentability standards
• Promotion of Innovation:Limitation of exceptions to patent rights
• Public health: Limitations to compulsory licensing and parallel importing
•  Traditional Knowledge: new challenges to patent laws
• Re thinking Patent rights: Should it be Individual private property or collective property?

Last date for submission of abstracts is 15th August 2012 and of final paper is 30th September 2012.

42,000 patent applications filed in 2011

According to an official statement from the Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma, 42,000 patent applications were filed in 2011. Such a huge number of patent applications indicates rising trend of patent filings.

Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma inaugurated the Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Intellectual Property Management (NIIPM) building at Nagpur, emphasising upon the recognition by the country of need for creating a pool of trained professionals to evaluate and assess the applications.

The Ministry also has plans to establish the India Intellectual Property Foundation at NIIPM, with collaboration of CII and World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

In the wake of increasing workload of patent application, Indian Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has recently recruited 257 examiners of patents and designs, who will undergo a comprehensive one-year training at NIIPM.

source 

Apple finally grabs apple.co.uk

Apple after 16 years of its online presence in UK has finally managed to grab the domain name apple.co.uk, which was previously used by a British Company, Apple illustration.

The change of ownership appeared to have occurred on July 6th. It appears that Apple has entered into a settlement with Illustration company as no records of cyber squatting complaint is found with Nominet, the .co.uk register.

Red bull Wins trademark battle

The energy drink company "Red bull" succeeded in its trademark infringement suit against Sun Mark Inc for  use of trademark  "Bullet" for their drinks and also for advertising slogan "No bull in this Can"

 The defendants, Sun mark and associated shipping sea Air & Land forwarding used the trademark "BULLET"for their energy drink. Red bull alleged that Sun mark's use has violated rights of Red bull in their mark "BULLIT" for energy drinks.

London High Court Judge, Mr Arnold siding with Red Bull's claim opined that Sunmark's use of "Bullet" is capable of creating a likelihood of confusion among the customers that it belong to Red bull. Further he added that use of  "no bull ...." slogan amounted to taking unfair advantage of repute of Red Bull.

But many including Sun mark's founder Dr Ranger finds Red Bull's acts as bully - boy tactics and unnecessary. Sun mark  now plans to prefer an appeal against this judgement and stated that Red bull's trademark bullit was registered in bad faith and the company had no plans to use it.

Source

Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Linkedin, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley & More in IP Conflict

In a patent trolling operation, Parallel Iron has sued a bunch of tech companies and banks because of the file systems they use.

The lawsuits were filed in April and those lawsuits were refiled in June. It also filed a bunch of new lawsuits, some of which were more specific about the file system. For example, in the Facebook and Amazon cases, the concerned file system is the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). In the Oracle suit, it's parallel Network File System (pNFS). Amongst all the defendants, EMC seems to be the only company who tried to first sue for declaratory judgment in a different venue. But still EMC has been dragged in the lawsuit with all the others in Delaware on the same day that EMC filed its own suit in Massachusetts. 

The facts of this suit suggest that the four inventors on these patents made some amazing breakthrough, and everyone else copied it: 

"In this technological age, we take for granted the ability to access tremendous amounts of data through our computers and the Internet, a process that seems effortless and unremarkable. But this apparent effortlessness is an illusion, made possible only by technological wizardry. The amount of information that is used by many companies has outstripped the storage capacity of individual memory devices. The information must be stored across hundreds or thousands of individual memory devices and machines. The ability to keep track of information as it is distributed across numerous devices and machines, while still allowing users to retrieve it seamlessly upon request, is a feat that was impossible until recently. It was made possible by the innovations of technological pioneers like Melvin James Bullen, Steven Louis Dodd, William Thomas Lynch, and David James Herbison.
Bullen, Dodd, Lynch and Herbison were, among others, members of a company dedicated to solving the difficult problems that limited the capacity of computer technology and the Internet, particularly problems concerning data storage. These engineers found innovative solutions for these problems and patented several technologies for data storage, including the ones at issue in this case. Many of the data-access feats we take for granted today are possible because of the data-storage inventions of Bullen, Dodd, Lynch and Herbison."

The patents in question are 7,197,662, 7,543,177 and 7,958,388, which are for "methods and systems for a storage system." The original filing dates for the patents in question come into picture around years 2002 and 2003. For Example, the year 2002 witnessed the original filing date of the 7,197,662 patent.