We’re celebrating the fifth World Intellectual Property Day
today at OUT-LAW, doing our little bit to raise awareness of the
role of IP in our daily lives, and to mark the contribution of
innovators and artists across the globe.
Asserting your rights is a dangerous game. You might get flamed;
you might get rich. This is your chance to hold your creative
heroes high or name and shame the mercenary scoundrels.
Submit your nominee using the form below.
We'll add your contributions to this page today (and over the
next few days). It can be a person or an organisation from recent
times or years gone by. Just as long as they have something to do
with intellectual property that you like or dislike.
All submissions are anonymous. We might edit or embellish some
contributions if we think it's appropriate and we might not
publish contributions that are clearly defamatory or just
rubbish.
Heroes of World Intellectual Property Day
- Thomas Edison for inventing a lightbulb
and other handy stuff and for these words of wisdom: "I make more
mistakes than anyone else I know. And sooner or later I patent most
of them."
- Florian Mueller, founder of the
NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign which campaigned against a European
law that many feared would open the floodgates to software patents.
The law eventually fell.
- Hugh Laddie, ex-judge who made "interesting
and controversial" judgments and for apparently being an Arsenal
fan and waving an Arsenal scarf above his head in the well known
Arsenal trade mark case.
- Jeremy Phillips, IP(Cool)Kat and all round
Superman – how does he find the time?
- The people behind patentlysilly.com,
for spending the time to highlight the more "unusual" patents being
granted by the US Patent Office.
- Richard Stallman, founder of the free software
movement, the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation and the
author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most
widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of
the copyleft. A fresh view on what is important and what is
unhelpful in IP law.
- Jim Callaghan, MP, for indefinitely extending
the term of copyright in "Peter Pan" for the benefit of Great
Ormond Street Children's Hospital by Schedule 6 of the 1988
Copyright, Designs & Patents Act. A rare exercise of common
sense and humanity by a legislator.
- George and Laura Bush, for their nice letter
about
Villains of World Intellectual Property Day
- NTP: many people hoped that BlackBerry would
somehow prevail in its lawsuit against NTP. Everyone except NTP,
that is. The company asserted its patent rights and threatened to
darken the screens on a nation’s handhelds. Eventually this tiny
company settled for more than $600 million last month.
- Eolas Technologies: won a whopping $520
million judgment against Microsoft after arguing that Internet
Explorer ripped-off an Eolas patent. But they’re not rich yet: a
retrial has been ordered.
- The Court of First Instance: who used the
trade mark Hoover in a generic way in a judgment earlier this
week.
- Cliff Richard: not just for the appalling
songs (an affront to copyright itself!) but for trying to extend
performer's royalty rights under the pretence of championing other
artists. Response from another submission: Cliff
wants to extend the copyright term for sound recordings rather than
the performer's right (which is a separate right under the CDPA
1988)
- Jerome Lemelson: This guy was a bit of both
really depending on who you ask. Some people view him as a hero, as
the Lemelson foundation donates huge amounts of money to US based
inventors and is seen as someone who made a real success of IP
exploitation. Others viewed him as one of the first real "patent
trolls", someone who made enormous sums of money by cleverly
predicting trends and filing anticipatory patents and the use of
"submarine patents", without ever really "creating" anything or
adding anything of value.
Jerome Lemelson is listed as an inventor on hundreds of United
States patents. During the last decade, Mr. Lemelson, his heirs,
and their attorneys have asserted that a large number of US
companies infringe one or more of the patents. The infringement
claims have generally involved patents that Lemelson's attorneys
call "machine vision" or "auto-id" patents. The patents have been
the subject of past and active litigation. If you do a google
serach for Lemelson and patents you get over 100,000 hits, which
shows the impact he has had.
- The Recording Industry association of America,
suing 12-year-olds for downloading nursery rhymes! Come on?! For
protectionism, paranoia and charging download prices which fail to
recognise the huge savings they are making in manufacture and
distribution costs of conventional music media.
- China: for their disturbing disregard for
intellectual property rights, resulting in sanctioned rip-offs of
everything from cars to computer chips. Oh, and for internet
censorship.
- SCO Group: for trying to use the nebulous and
not legally defined term of "Methods and Concepts" in its court
battle against IBM.
- Thomas Edison: for misappropiating so many
examples of other peoples IP (often those working for him).
- Dr Lionel Sawkins' lawyers: for bringing those
champions of under-exposed great classical music, Hyperion Records
(amost) to its knees over a dubious copyright claim. The only
winners here were the folks in the dark
suits. Response from another submission:
true, but they also helped establish a groundbreaking precedent on
the extent to which copyright protection is given to musicians when
there is a jointly created work. They've helped the cause of any
bass player in a band who is cut out of songwriting royalties!
Your nomination
