I enjoyed this

This is a link to a video on the BBC web site about the number of patents involved in the IPhone. I recommend it highly.

To add some of my own contribution, this is something I posted on my IT Law blog last year.

Intellectual property issues do seem to be dominating (apart from ongoing phone hacking issues)  the legal landscape. I’ll comment today on two developments, both of which have been referred to in previous postings.

The patent saga in respect of smart phone technology continues to rumble on.  You may recall that a consortium featuring Apple and Microsoft won an auction for a portfolio of patents owned by a bankrupt company with Google being an unsuccessful bidder and, as it seems from a recent posting from one of its senior legal advisers, a rather sore loser (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-android.html).

It does seem this saga may run and run.  I’ve previously commended Charles Arthur’s column in the Guardian. There is a fascinating diagram in this piece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/26/google-software-patents-warning?INTCMP=SRCH) which shows just how pervasive patents have become in the field. 

Increasingly it does seem as if patents are being used to stifle competition, if not necessarily innovation and it does seem to me that we are moving away from modern notions of patents and back to the Middle Age view that patents are a licence to print money.

This week has also seen the UK Government’s response to the Hargreaves Report on Intellectual Property Law (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipresponse-full.pdf) .  The response is very positive with all of the report’s recommendations being accepted and a promise made of legislation within the lifetime of this Parliament (until possibly 2015).

There are certainly some aspects of IP rights which can be resolved in a domestic context. An expansion, for example, in the exceptions made available for private copying of copyright protected works is a good example.  Increasingly, however the topic is assuming global dimensions. Recent reports have suggested, for example, that some UK developers are withdrawing their works from the Apple App store in the United States out of concerns that they may be sued for infringement of US patents. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/jul/15/app-developers-withdraw-us-patents) It may be questionable how much the UK can achieve in isolation.