Plagiarism Today

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Promotional Photo by FoundationCartier featurning Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossom Paintings. In July 2021, artist Damien Hirst debuted his latest exhibit , a collection of 107 paintings (30 of which were on display) of cherry blossoms. For Hirst, this was a major moment in his career and one that he took a great deal of pride in. However, last week, another UK-based artist, Joe Machine, came forward to accuse Hirst of ripping off his earlier works.

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

Can a work entirely created by a machine be protected by copyright? On Valentine’s Day, the US Copyright Office (Review Board) answered this question with a heartbreaking ‘no’, holding that “copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind”” and consequently refusing to register the two-dimensional artwork 'A Recent Entrance to Paradise' below (the ‘Work’): Creativity Machine's A Recent Entrance to Paradise Background In

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

In an opinion letter dated February 14, 2022, the Review Board of the United States Copyright Office (Review Board) affirmed a decision of the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) denying registration of a two-dimensional artwork generated by Creativity Machine, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm created by Dr. Stephen Thaler. Established by regulation in 1995, the Review Board is responsible for hearing final administrative appeals following two opportunities for a claimant to appeal copyright r

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The Trichordist

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

By now you’ve probably heard of the website HitPiece.com and their outrageous scheme to mint a “NFTs” of virtually every song and album in existence. If you… Read more "HITPIECE NFT RIPOFF: What you need to know and what can you do about it.".

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Advertiser: IPO

Women and diverse employees have the technical skill and knowledge, yet their contributions are not patented at the same rate as those of their male counterparts.This toolkit can help organizations move the needle on achieving gender parity in innovation.

Patent

Patently-O

FEBRUARY 7, 2022

by Dennis Crouch. WIPO administers the WIPO-administered Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs. In 2015, the US linked its design patent system with Hague — this gives U.S. designers easier access to global design rights; and non-U.S. applicants easier access to the U.S. market. This week, China announced that it is also joining the system.

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Nelligan Law

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Reading Time: 3 minutes Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, parents who do not see eye-to-eye on vaccinating their children or themselves are turning to the courts. Across the country, courts are recognizing that their expertise is law and not medicine. They are taking judicial notice of the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Parents who don’t give consent to vaccinate their child may find that the courts will order that their consent is not required, unless they can overcome that presumpt

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

Thank you to readers for voting in the IPKat book of the year awards, here are your 2021 nominees and winners! Best Patent Law Book The nominations were: EPC.App and PCT.App (Self-editable EPC and PCT reference books) Patent Subject Matter Eligibility: A Global Guide, (eds) Paul W Browning, Christopher C Johns and Sara A Leiman The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA, by Jorge L.

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

Intellectual property (IP) theft, especially of trade secrets, remains a significant threat to advanced U.S. industries, global competitiveness, and national security. It is foundational to the U.S. trade dispute with China, given state-sponsored efforts to steal as much American know-how as possible. Yet, instead of new laws and regulations, the United States has relied mainly on tariffs in an indirect effort to convince China to curb these illegal practices.

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TorrentFreak

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

From the day the first computer and video games were published, people have been able to pirate them. In the early days that involved copying cassettes and floppy disks and today most unauthorized copying takes place over the Internet. Over the past decades, a subset of gaming fans have united in Scene groups to ensure a steady stream of cracked games, i.e those that have had their protections removed.

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Michael Geist

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez introduced the much-anticipated sequel to Bill C-10 yesterday. The minister and his department insisted that the new Bill C-11 addressed the concerns raised with Bill C-10 and that Canadians could be assured that regulating user generated content is off the table. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the case.

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Patently-O

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

by Dennis Crouch. Gabara v. Facebook, Inc. (Supreme Court 2022). Thad Gabara is a former Bell Labs engineer and is a prolific inventor with 100+ patents in his name. Along the way, Gabara also became a patent agent and personally prosecuted many of his recent patents, including the Sliding Window patents asserted here. U.S. Patent Nos. 8,930,131; 8,620,545; 8,836,698; 8,706,400 ; and 9,299,348.

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Plagiarism Today

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister, Xavier Bettel, announced that he is voluntarily surrendering his 1999 DEA from the University of Lorraine in France. The move follows allegations in October that his 1998 thesis , written to obtain the degree, was heavily plagiarized. According to reports, of the 56 pages only two were free of plagiarized content, the introduction and conclusion, and one 20-page section was lifted wholly from the European Parliament website.

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

In the 2020 Commission IP Action Plan , the European Commission ('EC') announced that it would establish an EU Toolbox against counterfeiting. The EU Toolbox is part of the EU Strategy to tackle Organised Crime 2021-2025. The EC reports that despite efforts to battle counterfeit goods, the market is still thriving, with an increase of detained articles at EU borders.

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

As we enter the second month of 2022, the old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” and the famous line, “I’m not dead,” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, come to mind to describe two issues we’ll be watching closely this year relating to litigation involving small and large molecule therapies. In the first instance, Amgen recently petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Federal Circuit’s affirmance invalidating several patent claims based on the lack of enablement for g

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Technology & Marketing Law Blog

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

The court summarizes the case: Cub Club Investment created an app that allowed people to send racially diverse emoji. According to the complaint, when Apple learned of the app, it liked the idea—so much so, in fact, that it copied it. These screenshots (from the complaint) show the alleged copying: I trust the differences are immediately apparent. Both emoji sets obviously riff on the same theme, but that type of overlap is impossible to avoid in the emoji context.

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TorrentFreak

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

The non-fungible token (NFT) craze that’s been sweeping the internet for months now is a truly sight to behold. Huge sums of cryptocurrency are traded for these often Ethereum blockchain ‘items’ alongside dreams that one day they will be worth substantially more. As a result, the hype around NFTs (particularly where they relate to some kind of art) has reached astonishing levels, with new projects appearing all the time promising to revolutionize this and democratize that.

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Patently-O

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Guest post by Professors Sarah Burstein (University of Oklahoma) and Saurabh Vishnubhakat (Texas A&M University). In our new paper, The Truth About Design Patents , we debunk three widely held—but incorrect—views about U.S. design patents. Taken together, these myths paint a grim picture of design patents: Half of all design patent applications are rejected.

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The Illusion of More

FEBRUARY 9, 2022

In this episode, I talk to artists’ rights activists Neil Turkewitz and David Lowery about the scope and nature of fraud in the NFT trade–and why NFTs are yet another false promise to help independent artists in the digital age. Read Neil Turkewitz’s interview with artist bor, a member of the activist group @NFTTheft, and […].

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

This Kat dreams (or has nightmares) of anti-suit injunctions The EU is eager to promote innovation and growth in a digital age, but whose? This is the question one might reasonably ask on learning of the EU's launch of a complaint at the WTO against China last Friday, 18 February 2022. The substance of the complaint is the allegation that Chinese courts are obstacles to European companies' legitimate enforcement of telecom patents on technologies such as 3G, 4G, and 5G through the use of anti-su

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

Earlier this week, the USPTO released a report canvassing the current state of 5G technology attempting to “attain an informed understanding of the global competitiveness and economic vulnerabilities of United States 5G manufacturers and suppliers.” At the outset, the report noted that many other studies have been done to identify market leaders but have come to differing conclusions.

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Kashishipr

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

In the present emerging digital economy, innovators keep coming up with new ideas for the manufacturing sector with the potential to change and evolve the already existing ways of working and discover new ones. The issue that the manufacturers in different industries face is not that today’s technology has transformed and become exceedingly complicated.

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TorrentFreak

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

There is little doubt that for many people, streaming services have become the standard for watching movies and TV-shows. Subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ even converted some hardcore pirates, as they were seen as more convenient alternatives. There is a problem though. The whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many ‘Netflixes.

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Patently-O

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

by Dennis Crouch. Patent attorneys expect an initial office rejection, but clients often want to know: how long must this go on before we get our patent? The chart below provides some data on how many office-action rejections you might expect before a patent issues. To collect the data, I wrote a short bit of code to parse through the file histories of all the issued patents from the past several years and count the number of non-final and final rejections.

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JD Supra Law

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

Trademark filings in the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) space are a hot topic these days in the media and IP Bar, and many brand owners are asking themselves whether it’s time to join in or risk being left behind. As more consumers turn to online activities during the pandemic and technology continues to advance - allowing for more online collaboration and engagement in virtual reality meeting places - the question of whether and how a business can affirmatively protect its marks in.

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

There have been two referrals (consolidated) to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) on the question of the EPO's joint application approach to priority for PCT(EP) applications (G 1/22 and G 2/22). A referral on the co/joint applicants approach to priority has long been expected ( IPKat ), and the new referrals will hopefully provide some much legal clarity on this issue.

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

You may have heard that on January 1, 2022, Winnie-the-Pooh and the other characters from the Hundred Acre Wood are now in the public domain. But did you know that not all of Christopher Robin’s friends are treated the same in the eyes of copyright law? The characters have multiple authors, including A.A. Milne who first published Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, and The Walt Disney Company, which brought the stories to the screen.

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Technology & Marketing Law Blog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Edible Arrangements objected to Google selling its trademark to trigger keyword ads. They filed a trademark lawsuit in 2018 but abandoned the suit when it got sent to arbitration. However, they didn’t give up! The Edible team had the brilliant idea of suing Google for “theft of personal property” and “conversion,” where the stolen/converted asset was the trademark.

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TorrentFreak

FEBRUARY 11, 2022

There’s a market for pretty much anything digital today and ‘collectables’ in particular sell like hot cakes. The non-fungible token (NFT) rage shows that people are willing to pay vast amounts of money for a digital gimmick, that may or may not retain its value. These digital entries, stored on a blockchain, allow the buyers to prove that they are legitimate ‘owners’ to some underlying asset.

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Patently-O

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

by Dennis Crouch. The recent Federal Circuit decision in Caltech v. Broadcom includes an important discussion of extraterritorial damages further extending Carnegie Mellon (Fed. Cir. 2015) in finding that manufacture and delivery of a product in a foreign country can infringe a US patent if sufficient sales-activity occurred within the US. California Institute of Technology v.

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Kashishipr

FEBRUARY 9, 2022

In the present highly competitive business environment, understanding the market trends well is imperative for the development, and eventually, the success of a particular product or service. To be specific, market research performed before filing a Patent Application or after obtaining Patent Protection may help an inventor or innovator significantly in examining the business environment for his invention or innovation.

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The IPKat

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Since the 31st of January 2020 the United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union (‘EU’). With respect to trade marks, the departure of the UK has specific legal consequences. Article 54(1)(a) of the Withdrawal Agreement stipulates that holders of an EUTM registered or granted prior to the end of the transitional period (31 December 2020), will, by virtue of law, be granted a trade mark in the United Kingdom, consisting of the same sign, for the same goods or services.

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IP Watchdog

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

Publishers scored a win yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland when the court granted their request for a preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement of the Maryland Act, which essentially calls for compulsory licensing of electronic literary works to libraries on “reasonable terms”. The law went into effect on January 1, 2022.

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JD Supra Law

FEBRUARY 25, 2022

The advent of distributed ledger technology has ushered in a new digital era – a decentralized internet, neither owned nor controlled by a central authority. While blockchain enthusiasts hail this lack of centralization as representing a new chapter of freedom and individual empowerment, the punchline for brands is that the absence of adjudicating bodies and authorities also brings an abundance of uncertainty, risk, and discomfort.

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TorrentFreak

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Mid-June 2017 and in the wake of a lawsuit filed in the United States by broadcaster DISH Network, TVAddons – the largest third-party Kodi add-on repository at the time – disappeared from the Internet. All signs pointed to the events being connected but by August 2017, a bigger picture was emerging. On June 2, 2017, a coalition of Canadian telecoms giants including Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, had filed a copy

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Patently-O

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

I posted some statistics on references cited in recently issued patents. That raised some discussion in the comments regarding third-party prior art submissions. The chart below puts some numbers on the result that everyone likely expected–third party submissions are quite rare. Out of every 1,000 issued patents, only about 14 include prior art submissions from third parties.

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SpicyIP

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

We’re pleased to inform you that Third World Network and Inter University Centre for IPR Studies (IUCIPRS), CUSAT are jointly organising a free online workshop on ‘Access to Medicines TRIPS and Patents’ from 10th March to 8th April, 2022. The deadline for registration is 5th March, 2022. Online Course/Workshop on Access to Medicines TRIPS and Patents.

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