Wednesday whimsies
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| It's not just OHIM: pirates observe things too ... |
"The transfer, which was voted for by a large majority of MEPs [oh, for goodness' sake -- this was hardly a contentious issue on which Europe's fissiparous parliamentarians were likely to be divided, was it?], has to be formally adopted by the Council of the European Union under the ordinary legislative procedure before being finalised.
After the Council vote, which is expected to be passed at a meeting still to be confirmed by the Danish Presidency, the Regulation will be signed by the Presidents of the Parliament and the Council and will come into force twenty days after it is published in the Official Journal [an Official Journal which, in the good tradition of a bygone era, manages not to carry hyperlinks to things we'd like to click on -- in this case the Observatory website -- even in its electronic version].
The Observatory is expected to ensure, among other things, the collection analysis and dissemination of relevant, objective and reliable data regarding the value of IP rights and the infringements of those rights. As stated by Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier during a visit to OHIM last week, the priority should be to "understand, explain and act" to protect creativity and innovation" [As before, the IPKat wants to know the means by which the performance of the Observatory is to be measured in the real world -- particularly in terms of how, if at all, the information which it observes, gathers, sifts and peruses actually leads to the apprehension of infringers and a to diminution of illicit trade in counterfeit and infringing goods. Does anyone know?].
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| Conveniently located on the bank of the River Thames, the House of Lords has ways of dealing with those who fail the Unitary Patent Quiz ... |
• whether the Government agrees that the complex proposals will act as a disincentive to businesses and hamper the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises;
• the costs and sources of expertise of the Court, given that it will seek to employ almost 150 judges by 2022 and
• the prospect of success for the proposal in the light of almost unanimous opposition from stakeholders to the involvement of the Court of Justice of the European Union in patent law.
Meltwater: the floodgates open. So much happened yesterday in the Meltwater saga that the IPKat, pleading a prior engagement or three, missed dealing with it in its entirety. In short, Meltwater provides an online media monitoring service to business customers. Once the customers have selected their search terms, Meltwater sends them reports of articles containing those search terms. The reports includes the headline of each relevant article (which hyperlinks to the article), the opening words of the article and a brief extract showing the context in which the search term appears. The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) offers two licensing schemes, one for media monitoring organisations and the other for end users of those monitoring services. The NLA and some newspapers sued Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) in England and Wales for copyright infringement and the parties have been fighting ever since over the question whether Meltwater’s end users, such as PR companies, need to take a copyright licence from NLA. The trial court and the Court of Appeal said this unlicensed use of the newspaper-generated content infringed copyright. While a final appeal to the Supreme Court is pending, the UK's Copyright Tribunal gave an interim decision yesterday which confirmed that an end-user licence was necessary (celebrated by the NLA as a victory here) reduced the NLA's proposed licence fee by 90% (celebrated by Meltwater as a victory here). To complicate the issue, Associated Press almost simultaneously announced it was suing Meltwater in the United States (see AP media release here).