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Four years is a long time in politics but not a particularly long time in the land of government reports. Just under four years ago the UK Intellectual Property Office commissioned research to address the lack of existing data on design infringement. The results of that research were published last week .  Designs are an important part of the UK economy. In 2015, the UK design economy was worth 6% of the nation’s total economy. It was therefore considered a worthwhile exercise to review the current designs regime and identify opportunities for improvement. The report includes some positive indicators about the design sector " there is some evidence that the design sector as a whole is thriving, and that the use of design improves the productivity of firms in other sectors ." It is less positive about the legal mechanisms which are designed to protect this: " there is still little knowledge based on reliable evidence about the effectiveness of the legal system to achieve ...

New Kat on the block c/o https://www.coolstuff.com/Kidults-Kitty-Blocks This Kat had the pleasure of attending IR Global ’s event on IP and blockchain this morning. A select gathering of IP experts from around the world sat down in a London hotel and considered the merits of blockchain and what it could mean for the (intellectual property) future. What is blockchain? The most well known example of a blockchain is Bitcoin , a form of cryptocurrency based on a particular blockchain but there are any more options. For the uninitiated , blockchain is a form of "distributed ledger technology". This essentially means that it is a database which is simultaneously available via a network to any number of computers in the same format at the same time. Rather than having a centralised authority stating whether or not a particular change to the database is accurate or "true," the accuracy of a transaction is determined via some pre-agreed method of consensus between the compu...

Are you under the romantic spell of copyright law, so much so that its mutation into an aggressive economic tool protective of investments rather than creative labour has escaped your attention? Or, much like Fiona Macmillan in Kritika, have you been staring at the “ugly underbelly” of this mutant-copyright for quite some time now?    Copyright is one of the many IP rights which, according to some has got out of hand (due to over-expansion across various dimensions) or is increasingly out of touch with reality (due to obsolescence). With the third volume of Kritica – Essays on Intellectual Property law , editors Haans Ullrich, Peter Drahos and Gustavo Ghidini, delivers an academic review of the IP system’s inadequacy. A tall order indeed. Taken together, the overarching conclusion reached by the contributors is that fixing copyright, or any other IP right, would require re-tuning the core concepts of both national and international IP laws. Each chapter of the collection engag...