NIPC Law

Intellectual Property Office Crown Copyright Jane Lambert Intellectual Property Office (Phil Thorpe) I nnermost Ltd. v Warm BL 0/464/19 6 March 2020 Over the years the UK has consistently trailed its neighbours in the number of European patent applications.  In 2018. for instance, the UK filed 5,738 compared to 43,612 from the USA, 26,734 from Germany, 22,615 from Japan, 10,317 from France, 9,401 from China, 7,927 from Switzerland, 7,296 from South Korea and 7,149 from the Netherlands (see European Patent Office Annual Report 2018 Statistics at a Glance ). I had always attributed our performance to the high cost of enforcement proceedings in the English courts but the changes to CPR Part 63 and the Part 63 Practice Direction which reduced and capped the costs of litigating in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court in 2010 do not seem to have made much difference (see Jane Lambert New Patent County Court Rules 31 Oct 2010).  There may be another exp...

In Ifejika v Ifejika and another [2011] EWPCC 31 (23 Nov 2011) His Honour Judge Birss QC (as he then was) ordered among other things an inquiry (or alternatively, by implication, an account) in relation to a lens care product the design rights in which he held to have been infringed by the claimant's brother by of a competing product. The claimant elected an account of profits and this came on before HH Judge Hacon on 17 June 2014 ( Ifejika v Ifejika and another [2014] EWHC 2625 (IPEC) (31 July 2014)). This case is interesting for two reasons. First, it was an account of profits rather than an inquiry as to damages. Accounts are not common in intellectual property cases. Secondly, neither side was legally represented at the hearing so the judge had to do justice as best he could. He was therefore bound to explain the principles by which an account is to be taken. A factor that might have applied in other circumstances was that the defendant could have a...