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UPC ratification speeds up with Germany's
draft legislation |
Germany heading towards UPC ratification as UK's future looks questionable: Despite the announcement that the UK's referendum on the EU will be this June, UPC ratification is speeding up with news last week that the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) published the
first draft of legislation that will get the gears in motion for ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement. The draft legislation was accompanied by a
second bill which will implement the unitary patent into German law. As to timing, the final drafts are expected to be introduced to the German parliament before summer 2016 for debate and then a vote. So by the summer we will know whether Germany is formally in and the UK out of the project that has taken over 40 years to get to....typical!
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| LCII is bringing a blockbuster seminar your way.... |
A patent lawyer and a competition lawyer walk into a conference.... To find out the punchline to that joke (and she is sure its side/head-splitting), the AmeriKat suggests that you attend the Liege Competition & Innovation Institute (LCII)'s conference on 29 February 2016 on 'Regulating Patent "Hold-up"'. The introduction states:
"The patent hold-up theory has nurtured many policy developments in the past ten years. On the one hand, Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) have been exploring changes to their licensing policies, in particular in relation to the commercial implications of FRAND pledges given by holder of Standard Essential Patents (“SEPs”). On the other hand, antitrust agencies and patent courts across the globe have been confronted with several waves of cases. Those proceedings have generated a thick, diverse and somewhat inconsistent body of case-law on a wide array of topics, including the availability of injunctive relief, patent valuation, portfolio licensing, practicing and non-practicing entities, etc. This conference seeks to provide a 360° state of play on patent hold-up in contemporary antitrust and patent policy."
The line up looks blockbuster with Melchior Wathelet (Advocate General, Court of Justice of the EU), Renata Hesse (Deputy Assistant Attorney General, US Department of Justice), Scott Kieff (Commissioner, US International Trade Commission), Gunnar Wolf (Case Handler, DG Competition, EU Commission) and Alvaro Ramos (Antitrust Legal Counsel, Qualcomm) among the speakers. For more information click
here and to register click
here.
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A cool $750 million will
help pay for quite a few
scholarships, the AmeriKat
suggests |
$750 million for Marvell to settle Carnegie Mellon chip dispute: Last Wednesday Marvell announced that it would pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million to settle a 7 year old patent infringement action on two patents that related to the accuracy in which hard disk drive circuits could read data from high-speed magnetic disks (see
here and
here). Carnegie alleged that at least nine Marvell circuit devices infringed the patents. The amount represents a 50 cent/chip royalty on the basis of 556.8 million chips imported into the US. The settlement comes after the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
held that Marvel should pay at least $278.4 million (a knock down of the original $1.17 billion jury award). A Kat pat to
Dr.Ward for alerting the AmeriKat to this story. For more information see these articles in
Ars Technica and
Reuters.
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NPR brings news of the new
copyright battle - academic articles |
Are academic journals too expensive? The AmeriKat was listening to NPR on Saturday when a story on Weekend Edition came up about a new pirate website called Sci-Hub which is permitting free access to academic journals which normally require a paid subscription. Apparently, with some university libraries scaling back on the number of academic journals they subscribe to faculty and students are sourcing articles form sites such as Russian based Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub claim to have already made 50 million articles freely available. However, some academics feel that this is just an evolution in providing users the resources they need to conduct research (the Napster to Spotify evolution for academic publications, if you will). To listen to the debate, click
here
