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What if HAL could have IP rights? WIPO joins the conversation on AI and IP Movie buffs may recall HAL 9000 as the fictional AI character and main antagonist in Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur Clarke's Space Odyssey series. Although the film recently celebrated its 50 year anniversary, with rapid recent advances in AI technology,...
Lockdown pirates: at what cost? COVID lockdown has had us all settling in to a new way of living. We've learned that the unobserved life doesn't require as much time packing our lunches, washing our gym kit or sorting out our eyebrows – leaving more than enough hours to binge watch...
Third strike for AI machines as patent inventors – this time USPTO says no As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more developed and more sophisticated, patent offices worldwide are being asked whether AI machines can be named as the patent inventor of AI generated inventions. Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark...
Spring-cleaning: time for a fresh look at the EU competition rules on vertical agreements? The European Commission is reviewing the effectiveness and relevance of EU competition rules on supply agreements, namely the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (VBER) (and accompanying Vertical Guidelines).  The European Commission has now published a...
How will COVID-19 affect the future of environmental taxes? Whilst the impact of COVID-19 on the environmental taxes agenda is yet to be fully understood, it would seem prudent for businesses to continue to prepare for the implementation of those measures announced albeit with the expectation that there may be...
How many hammers are needed to crack a nut? The ‘cum-ex scandal’ being the nut in question here. After a consortium of journalists uncovered schemes generating multiple refunds of German dividend withholding tax, the European Parliament asked the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and...
Are you a responsible tech partner? New government guidance is advising parties to contracts to act responsibly and fairly and support the Covid-19 response. The impact of Covid-19 on all sectors has been substantial, and the long term effects are still unknown. IT services have become more...
‘How did you get in here?’ - What rights do you have against third parties when your IT staff go rogue? The recent High Court case of Media Entertainment NV v Karyagdyyev and another [2020] EWHC 1138 (QB) is interesting, particularly for tech companies, as it involves the often feared and always undesirable headache – what rights do you have against third...
How far does the fiction of a deeming provision extend? Not far enough to let the taxpayer escape UK tax under the UK/South Africa Tax Treaty, according to the Supreme Court in Fowler v HMRC. In its recent judgment, overturning the Court of Appeal’s decision, the Supreme Court held that a South African...
New Horizons: Quantum Computing and the Banking Sector The stage is set for quantum computing to bring about seismic changes in the world as we know it. As IBM and Google, among others, publicly race to develop quantum computers that can solve a real-world problem with an acceptable rate of error, a...