IP News Mai 2018
Welcome to IP News This Month. Here’s your 5-minute guide to all things intellectual property, culled from news reports from around the world. Tips or comments? Send them direct to jeffjohnroberts AT gmail.com. Thanks for reading! – Jeff
Top 3 Stories
The tech industry is expanding an anti-troll program by giving away more patents to startups; the giveaway is one part of a Google-backed cross-licensing network aimed at reducing litigation
Dozens of IP profs sent a letter to Congress, urging lawmakers to amend a proposed law that would extend copyright for sound recordings up to 144 years
Judge clears way for R-Rated muppet movie, ruling the “No Sesame, All Street” tagline for the film—which features puppet sex and drug use—doesn’t infringe the IP of the beloved children’s show
Canada
A House committee is calling for Parliament to advise the broadcast regulator not to go forward with an ISP-backed anti-piracy scheme over fears it could hurt free speech and net neutrality
The Ontario Court of Appeal rejected a proposed class action by land surveyors who claimed a provincial registry infringed copyright by digitizing their reports
A Chinese telecom giant is “feasting [on] publicly funded Canadian intellectual property” said BlackBerry’s former in a criticism of campus IP policies; CIPP founder Prof Gold weighs in with a similar caution about foreign firms
United States
A jury ordered Samsung to pay Apple an eye-popping $539 million for infringing three design patents; the verdict came in a damages retrial of a 2012 case that has already been to SCOTUS—and is likely to drag on even further
A rival filed a copyright suit against the maker of the wildly popular video game Fortnight, claiming infringement of its version of a “battle royale” where multiple players fight it out
The monkey selfie case will “never ever die” moans a tech site on news the 9thCircuit will take yet another look at the copyright issues
The State Department plans to shorten visa terms for Chinese science and tech students in hopes of reducing IP theft
Kodak pushed forward with a plan to raise $50 million for a copyright project that aims to record images on a blockchain
Google filed for an en banc review of a controversial ruling that allowed Oracle to assert copyright in APIs
The FDA gave a boost to generic drug makers by publishing complaint letters that describe how patent owners game safety rules to preserve their monopoly
Hasbro obtained a rare scent trademark for Play-Doh as the USPTO granted the brand protection for “sweet, slightly musky, vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the smell of a salted, wheat-based dough.”
Europe
European regulators will begin “algorithm audits” of Facebook that will let them pick through sensitive IP, including the company’s source code
EU states approve “snippet tax” plan that will force tech companies to pay publishers a neighboring right royalty if they display any part of a news story within one year of publication
International
New Zealand tattoo artists say the country’s review of its Copyright Act should include stronger protection for Maori ink designs
Chinese courts are actually doing more to enforce IP rights of foreign plaintiffs say lawyers cited by the FT
The Japanese investment giant Softbank is raising a $400 million fund for patent trolling; the move is raising eyebrows as Softbank invests in many startups that could be hit by nuisance patent suits
WIPO’s Director General, who was criticized over tech transfers to North Korea, is in a new controversy over a bonus program for “exceptionally meritorious performance” — that was awarded to every single WIPO employee
This content has been updated on September 28, 2018 at 19:43.
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