Posts in International

When an undertaking operates in more than one country of the European Union it is a wise legal choice to apply for a trademark on a community level. A community trademark allows the applicant to file for a trademark within 28 countries of the European Union instead of the expensive and time consuming method of independent national filings for each country. The downside of the Community trademark application is with respect to satisfying the requirement of genuine use in connection with goods and services. Within 5 years of trademark registration the mark must be used in more than one country of the European community. In Sofa Workshop Limited v. Sofaworks Limited, the judgment elucidated upon the term “Genuine Use” in respect of trademarks and the territory covered by them.

The earlier days of black box technology well behind us, the magnetic tape recording medium has since been replaced by solid state memory to record data. Today, black boxes used on aircraft regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration has to meet some exacting specifications. FDR equipment must be able to record data for 25 hours consecutively and be able to withstand extreme conditions like impacts up to 3,400 Gs and fires lasting 30 minutes and reaching temperatures of 2,000°F. It can also resist water pressures at depths up to 20,000 feet. The CVR equipment must meet the same extreme condition specifications and record up to two hours of sound. Further, the black box equipment is mounted in the tail of the plane, which typically suffers last in an impact, giving the black box the best chance of survival.

When you think about the american auto industry it’s becoming clearer every day that the idea of American-made or Japanese-made is not black and white. Increasingly, the innovative technologies going into the vehicles being sold in our country are also coming from overseas. It’s pretty telling that industry data indicates that there are no truly American-made cars being sold anymore. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2015 American Automobile Labeling Act (AALA) report shows that the cars constructed with the most American parts still had foreign parts used in at least one-quarter of the vehicle’s construction. Most of the cars that were three-quarters composed of American parts were made by General Motors Company, including the Buick Enclave, the Cadillac CTS and the Chevrolet Corvette.

In June, authorities in France served a formal notice to Google that it must delete certain links from it’s Google.com domain on a legal basis known as ‘the right to be forgotten.’ The right to be forgotten is implicated when an individual contacts a search engine company, such as Google, asking for a search result to be de-listed, essentially taking it out of their available search results. The provider assesses whether the privacy issue at stake has enough merit to de-list the link. If they don’t, the individual then has another avenue to take with a regulatory agency which may overturn the search engine provider’s decision.

Near the middle of August, a nuclear power plant operated by Kyushu Electric Power in the Japanese city of Sendai restarted its reactors to produce electricity once more for the country’s electrical grid. The move is significant because it is the first of 25 nuclear power plants in Japan to restart after applying to reopen since the 2011 explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the world’s most recent nuclear disaster. There have understandably been some mixed reactions to the decision. Areas around the Fukushima Daiichi plant are still so heavily contaminated with radiation that there are many of the 160,000 people originally evacuated from the region who still cannot return.

In the decision dated 5th May, 2015, the General Court of the European Union concluded, upon examining the opposition by British SKY Broadcasting Group Plc (now SKY International) against Skype Ultd, that there is an existence of likelihood of confusion between the prior registered mark, “SKY” and the applied mark, “SKYPE” preventing the registration of the sign, SKYPE, in the European community.

Both Korea and China are major players on the global patent stage, and the leading companies of these countries file and obtain thousands of patents annually. But it seems increasingly clear that the governments of these countries are attempting to support their domestic companies via antitrust enforcement to lower the price of access to patented technologies of foreign competitors.

There’s one very important limitation to note when talking about the Lexus hoverboard: it can only be operated across a track which has a metal layer running across beneath the surface. On most roads, skate parks and handrails, this product would drop like a brick. It’s held aloft by magnetic forces strong enough to keep the board four inches in the air. Depending on a rider’s weight, the board hovers between one and two inches off of the ground. The magnets gain enough force to do this with the help of superconductors that are cooled to about -321°F with the help of liquid nitrogen, which creates a vapor trail of exhaust coming from the hoverboard that makes for an interesting added effect.

Skynet. HAL 9000. The Matrix. The Joshua Computer from WarGames. It’s not hard to look around popular culture and find examples of artificial intelligence (AI) stirring a span of doomsday fears stemming from either a lack of understanding of AI’s dangers to the actual targeting of humans by AI weapons. The names of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking, along with several faculty members from academic institutions like Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are among hundreds of signatures found attached to an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute which calls for “concrete research directions” to pursue for ensuring that AI remains a social benefit.

The controversy swirling around the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Trade Agreement sheds light on two critically important but divisive issues: international trade and intellectual property protection for pharmaceuticals. One of the most significant sticking points in the negotiations is the issue of intellectual property protection for pharmaceuticals, specifically data exclusivity. Data exclusivity is a means of correcting a free-riding market failure, providing the innovative firms with a limited period of time in which data from clinical trials and other required testing cannot be used by competing firms to secure market access.

In 2012, the global robotics industry saw a total of $26.8 billion in economic activity, according to Bloomberg Business. Much of this was focused in the field of heavy industrial robotics, as was pointed out in a video segment produced by the business news publisher, but robotics for consumers are expected to become a much larger sector in the next…

A lot of research and development into alternative fuels for aircraft has focused on biofuels, which has also been an area of focus of automakers. Last January, Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA) announced a series of developments in creating green diesel that cuts carbon dioxide emissions in half compared to conventional fossil fuels. The company also unveiled a breakthrough in the effective biofuel conversion of halophytes, shrub like plants indigenous to the Middle East which grow in seawater found near desert terrain.

Any story about innovation that starts with Leonardo da Vinci is one worth telling. The fact that the great French philosopher René Descartes also plays a starring role in the history of the contact lens makes this story of innovation all the more noteworthy. Conceived in the earliest parts of the 16th century, 34 million Americans wear thin film contact lenses over their eyes for some form of vision enhancement. The first true contact lenses was created by Swiss physicist A.E. Fick in 1888, when the lens maker fabricated a spherical glass segment for the correction of refractive errors in a wearer’s eyes.

The development of the roller coaster as a ride for thrill seekers is primarily an American invention but the story of the modern coaster’s development spans centuries and continents. Roller coasters have served purposes as diverse as human entertainment and coal transportation. They have been the centerpieces of some of the most famous theme parks in history. As millions of people lower their shoulder harnesses and strap in for the ride this summer, let’s take a quick look back at the intriguing story of the origins of the modern roller coaster and how it has changed over the years.

The two largest patent portfolios related to BLE technologies are owned by Irvine, CA-based fabless semiconductor company Broadcom and South Korean electronics giant Samsung. A market map view of the top innovators in the BLE space shows that not only does Broadcom have a slightly larger portfolio than Samsung, it has also dealt with far less litigation than the South Korean developer. The large collection of companies clustering in the lower-left quadrant of this market map represent companies with smaller patent portfolios and lower revenues. The dozens of companies dotting this portion of the map could be an indication that mergers and acquisitions in the IoT semiconductor chip space may be far from over this year.