NIPC Law

In my early years at the Bar I did a lot of work for John Morris who was in-house legal advisor to the NCC (National Computing Centre).  The NCC had been established in 1966 as an autonomous not-for-profit organization, to be the "voice of the computer user",  encourage the use of computers in the UK and  offer education and training in computers. John spotted an opportunity for his company. He saw a need for source code escrow and persuaded his employers to offer one of the first escrow services in the UK. Escrow is an arrangement by which a software house or software maintenance contractor deposits the latest version of a computer program in human readable form known as "the source code" to a trusted third party such as the NCC ("the escrow agent") with instructions to release the source code to the customer should the software house or maintenance contractor be unable or unwilling to maintain the program because of insolvency or some other ca...

In Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd v. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer International Holdings Inc and Others   [2007] Bus LR 1796, [2007] BusLR 1796, [2008] 1 All ER 425, [2007] UKHL 43 Lord Hoffmann described s.7 (2) and (3) of the Patents Act 1977  as "an exhaustive code for determining who is entitled to the grant of a patent." For determining entitlement to the grant maybe because s.32 (3) of the Act provides that "Notwithstanding anything in subsection (2)(b) above, no notice of any trust, whether express, implied or constructive, shall be entered in the register and the comptroller shall not be affected by any such notice."  But not necessarily to ownership because s.30 (1) states that patents and patent applications are personal property and sub-section (3) adds that they may vest by operation of law in the same way as any other personal property. `Disputes over equitable interests in patents or patent applications are fairly rare but they can arose in cir...