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Union Jack Kat Readers with an interest in UK design law will remember that the  Intellectual Property Act 2014  introduced a new appeal regime for designs.  The system of appeals to an Appointed Person, as an alternative to the route of appealing to the High Court in heavier and more complex cases, was intended to mirror the longstanding system of appeals to an Appointed Person (AP) in trade mark appeals. In fact, the relevant rules for design appeals are modelled on those for trade mark cases. Readers will also remember that  Sir Richard Arnold  had advocated the extension of the Appointed Person appeal route for registered designs instead of the appeal route to the Patents County Court, which was enacted but never brought into force in place of the Registered Designs Appeal Tribunal. Now via Sir Richard Arnold comes the news that last week  Martin Howe QC  issued the first decision of an AP in a registered design ( Appeal O/253/17 ...

Heks'nkaas Readers with an interest for copyright in unusual or, rather, less conventional 'objects'  [I will explain below why the word 'works' might not be appropriate]  will know that for quite some time it has been disputed whether IP protection - particularly in the form of copyright - is available to, say, perfumes or culinary creations. So far proponents of sensory copyright have not been really met with widespread approval  [for the sake of a debate organised in London a while ago by IPKat founder  Jeremy Phillips  and  BLACA , I supported the motion that there is indeed such thing as sensory copyright - my slides are available  here ; Jeremy's report can be read  here ] . Not long time ago, contrary to some lower instances' decisions, the French Supreme Court  dismissed  for instance the idea that copyright could subsist in a perfume  [ here ;  here  for a Dutch take on the matter] , and in 2015...

Kat-mining At the time of unveiling its  Digital Single Market Strategy in May 2015 , the EU Commission linked the establishment of a fully connected digital single market to the objective of creating a favourable environment for European start-ups and SMEs. With specific regard to copyright, however, it soon appeared that start-ups and SMEs were not really part of the picture as far as Commission’s action in this area of the law is concerned. In this sense, the  proposal for a directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market , which was released in September 2016, is a telling example. The content of the proposed text and data mining exception The draft provisions intended to remedy the so called ‘value gap’ (Article 13) and establish a new right for press publishers (Article 11) have been extensively criticized for – among other things – having the potential to raise barriers to entry in the markets for, respectively, hosting platforms and news aggregato...

KAT-LEAK: exclusive image of Brussels cabinet meeting Leaks of internal EU Commission documents have seemingly become unavoidable events in-between one official release and another from this EU institution. The latest leak,   published   by Politico, is that of an internal note to the attention of  Commissioner  Bieńkowska 's  Head of Cabinet concerning the forthcoming (?) review of the enforcement framework, including the   Enforcement Directive . As readers will remember, the Commission itself announced that this is part of the agenda when it unveiled its   Digital Single Market Strategy  (DSMS)   two years ago (May 2015). Despite the timeframe indicated in the 2015 DSMS, a more thorough review of the enforcement framework is (or, rather, was?) expected in the first half of 2017, including the release of proposals to review existing EU legislation. So far nothing has happened on this front.  The reason - as t...

"Buy digital": but are you really buying to own? Can you resell the books, CDs, and DVDs that you are no longer interested in having? The answer to this question is easy: usually, yes. But what about the case of ebooks, music tracks, and films downloaded from the internet? Well, here, the question is more difficult and - at least at the EU level - does not have a clear answer yet. The issue is particularly complex due to both practical and legal reasons. The following post can be accompanied by   these slides   I prepared for a recent lecture at Bocconi University in Milan. Degradation (or lack thereof) A perfect analogy between physical and digital copies of a work does not seem really possible to be drawn in the first place. Unlike analogue/physical copies (eg a book), in principle the digital copy of a work is not subject to any sort of appreciable degradation. If you read the same ebook five times, the quality of the copy you have remains substan...

Uber or taxi? Is Uber a transport activity or an information society service? Why does the answer to this matter? Why all this matter? To the first question, this morning Advocate General (AG) Szpunar has provided a response in his Opinion in  Asociación Profesional Élite Taxi v Uber Systems Spain , C-434/15 , a reference for a preliminary ruling from Spain (Juzgado Mercantil No 3 de Barcelona). The answer to the second question is that - depending on how Uber is classified - it can or cannot enjoy one of the founding freedoms of the EU internal market: the freedom to provide services. Article 2(2) of the  Service Directive , in fact, excludes transport activities from the scope of the directive. However if Uber was classified as an intermediary between the owner of a vehicle and a person who needs to make a journey within a city, then it could be regarded as an information society service. As such, it could enjoy the freedom to provide its service...