Way more than an everyday interest in IP
America! It’s a land of flags, Twinkies, NASCAR. and Constitutional amendments. Matal v Tam (PDF) is the most recent warning not to get between an American and any of those things. The case concerned the application by a “new-wave dance rock” band to register their band name as a trade mark. Ordinarily, the US Patent and read more…
Every now and then a case cracks open a delicious mix of intellectual property and commercial problems. Recent litigation by Barokes over “wine in a can” is one such example. After centuries of drinking wine out of glass bottles (or ‘goon sacks’ [1]) two inventors took the plunge and developed revolutionary technology for “wine in a read more…
Forget Napster! One of the biggest problems in the music industry is the who, what, where, and why: which labels and publishers, performers, songwriters and producers own which rights and what split of royalties should be paid? Worse still: when are the songs being played, who by, and for what purpose? This occurs, in part, read more…
Open source software is regularly used as a way of leveraging the collective knowledge of the software development community by allowing anyone to improve and contribute to the code, provided they ‘pay it forward’ and allow their improved code to be used by the community. Open source software is often incorporated into proprietary software to read more…
A decision in March of the Full Federal Court in Australian Mud Company Pty Ltd v Coretell Pty Ltd [2017] FCAFC 44 concerning unjustified threats of infringement will have some lawyers as happy as pigs in mud. Dishing the Dirt Australian Mud Company Pty Ltd (AMC) is the owner of an innovation patent related to core read more…
Live streaming is a red-hot topic in the Australian IP sphere. In February this year, the streaming of Foxtel’s broadcast of the Mundine v Green fight kicked-off debate around sports rights, streaming and the role of social media as hosts. In the United Kingdom, the live streaming controversy extended beyond feisty Facebook comments when Arnold read more…
The UK High Court’s 150+ page epic on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licence terms in Unwired Planet v Huawei has stirred up a lot of commentary in the tech nerd space and the international patent community (across which there is probably a fair bit of overlap). The decision goes some way to standardising the read more…
Can a manufacturer apply for Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) approval for a generic drug before the patent has expired? Justice Nicholas held in February in Apotex Pty Ltd v Warner-Lambert Company LLC (No 3) [2017] FCA 94 that the answer was “Yes”, and his Honour’s decision was recently affirmed by the Full Federal Court in read more…
Our sense of smell (or ‘olfactation’ as it is technically described) is said to be the sense most intimately linked to our memories. There are certain distinctive smells that, without fail, trigger in us nostalgia for the halcyon days of childhood – the bleach-like whiff of chlorine after a day at the local pool, the read more…