Topic: Intellectual property

The UK government has issued a new consultation, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, under which it is proposing to address a tension that exists between:

Does a browser plug-in that suppresses advertisements on websites (a so-called “ad blocker”) by manipulating browser-generated data structures constitute an unauthorised modification of a computer program, and so amount to an infringement of copyright under Germany copyright law?

The UK Supreme Court has handed down its hotly-anticipated trade mark decision in the Skykick v Sky case. The Supreme Court judgment was given notwithstanding that the parties having settled the dispute, indicating the significance of the points of law that were raised in the case.

Influence and content creation have revolutionized the approach to marketing. In the absence of specific regulations applicable to this new form of advertising, influence marketing has been - until now - solely governed by existing law, in particular advertising law and consumer law.

As recent innovations in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) such as ChatGPT ignite debate over issues such as the legal status of non-humans, privacy implications of novel computing abilities, and rights of intelligent systems’ creators over output, similar considerations confront another emerging computing field—one involving human cells.

The Commercial Court in Jinxin Inc v Aser Media Pte Ltd and others & Others has ruled that an employer’s right to monitor and access private information of an employee held on its systems does not extend to a loss of confidentiality in those documents, and therefore a loss of privilege, as against the employer.

In Benjamin Moore & Co. v. Attorney General of Canada, 2022 FC 9231, the Federal Court of Canada set aside the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s (CIPO) refusal of patent applications for two computer-implemented inventions relating to colour selection methods using experimentally derived relationships for colour harmony and colour emotion.

Luxury design house Hermès International and Hermès of Paris, Inc. (Hermès) is suing artist Mason Rothschild in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for trademark infringement and dilution, misappropriation of its BIRKIN trademark, cybersquatting, false designation of origin and description, and injury to business reputation.

The UK Government has published its response to the consultation on AI and IP rights (our recent blog post sets out a detailed overview of the questions raised by the consultation), having held several roundtables and received detailed written responses from participants across industries.

After a somewhat surprising victory in the Federal Court last year (about which we wrote in our article ‘Rise of the Machines’), the hopes that an artificial intelligence machine, nicknamed DABUS, could be named as the inventor on a patent application have now been dashed by the Full Court. In short, the Full Court upheld an appeal by the Commissioner, ultimately finding that Dr Thaler’s patent application had indeed lapsed for failure to name an ‘inventor’ as required by the relevant regulations.