Exclusive: Nokia to appeal Chinese FRAND ruling in SEP feud with Oppo
Nokia will appeal against global licensing terms set by China’s Chongqing First Intermediate People’s Court in its standard-essential patent dispute with Oppo, the Finnish company told Managing IP on Thursday, December 14.
The appeal will be before the Supreme People’s Court of China.
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US continues to resist mandatory IP rules in latest WHO pandemic draft
The US and its allies are holding firm against the inclusion of mandatory intellectual property transfer rules in a proposed pandemic treaty by the World Health Organization, the latest working document has revealed.
Negotiators reconvened in Geneva earlier this month for talks over a new legal instrument that is supposed to be agreed by May 2024.
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Crowell & Moring hires former Knobbe Martens partner
Crowell & Moring’s newest intellectual property partner was drawn to the firm in part because it is full service, he told Managing IP.
Litigator Jon Gurka has joined Crowell & Moring in Orange County, California, Managing IP revealed on Thursday, December 14.
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Other articles published by Managing IP this week include:
Lenovo IP head: licensors ‘bypass’ FRAND analysis to gain advantage
Arch Insurance: we're only ‘scratching the surface’ of IP opportunities
Weekly take: Contrasting AI copyright decisions show need for harmonisation
Tech transfer podcast: how IP owners could be forced to share know-how
Elsewhere in IP
CVPO growth
The EU’s Community Plant Variety Office has appointed Nuria Urquía as its new vice president, the office announced on Tuesday, December 12.
A CVPO spokesperson said Urquía will oversee “critical projects and initiatives, furthering the CPVO's mission to foster innovation in plant varieties through effective intellectual property protection”.
Urquía has a background in academia, government, and international organisations, and has previously held senior roles at the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture and the UN Organization for Food and Agriculture.
Before joining the France-based CPVO, Urquía was the head of the registry of commercial and protected varieties at the Spanish Plant Variety Office.
Meta AI row
Lawyers for Meta raised concern about using copyright-protected books to train an artificial intelligence (AI) model but the company did it anyway, according to court documents filed on Monday, December 11.
Comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors sued Meta this summer, accusing the platform owner of using their works without permission to train its AI language model called Llama.
According to Reuters, this week’s filing includes chat logs of a Meta-affiliated researcher describing his back-and-forth with Meta's legal department over whether use of the book files as training data would be “legally ok”.
IP funding gap
Only 8% of “IP-rich” companies in the UK have reached “scale-up status”, a report published this week by professional services firm Aon has found.
Thereport, published on Wednesday, December 13, found that there are 18,477 IP-rich companies in the UK, but only 8% have reached scale-up status. In total, 18.5% have managed to raise equity funding.
Scale-up status is defined by the OECD as when a company has an average annualised return of at least 20% over the last three years and had at least ten employees at the start of that three-year period.
Aon added that out of the 18,477 IP-rich companies, just 381 (2%) reached scale-up status and also raised equity funding.
The report also notes that of the equity-backed companies, the top sectors included AI, genomics, big data, and the internet of things.
DesignEuropa Awards
The EUIPO will hold its 2024 DesignEuropa Awards in Riga. Latvia, in collaboration with the Latvian IP office, it announced on Wednesday, December 13.
DesignEuropa Awards, which celebrate excellence in registered community designs, will become an annual event starting next year. Previously, it took place every two years.
The EUIPO has also introduced a new ‘Next Generation Design Award’ category, which will recognise up-and-coming designers up to 29 years old.
Entries for the 2024 awards are open until March 15.
DABUS showdown
The UK Supreme Court will weigh in on whether AI can be named as an inventor on patent applications next Wednesday, December 20.
The judgment will be the latest instalment in the so-called DABUS case, a series of legal battles led by computer scientist Stephen Thaler and lawyer Ryan Abbott.
Thaler has applied for patents in multiple jurisdictions naming AI tool DABUS as the inventor of a food storage system.
The UKIPO rejected the filing on the grounds that only humans can be named as inventors. The England and Wales High Court and Court of Appeal backed the UKIPO.
That's it for today, see you again next week.
