Licensing and Agreements

Intellectual property rights cover exclusive rights originating from the mental labour of their creators or inventors and include copyright, trademarks, industrial designs, patents, geographical indications, and plant variety rights.

IP rights may be the subject of a licence, where the proprietor of an IP right (the licensor) while maintaining the ownership, authorises a third person (the licensee) to use and exploit the IP right during trade, under the terms and conditions set out by both parties.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the use of patents has been one of the valuable tools used for the protection of inventions, particularly inventions that are considered to have commercial value and appeal.

Owning a patent gives you a valuable property right, it allows an inventor to commercially make, use, and sell inventions for a specified period.

Africa is a vast continent with 54 countries and a plethora of legal traditions that can bewilder trademark applicants wishing to protect their intellectual property in this fast-growing region. The continent boasts two regional agreements, which allow multi-jurisdictional trademark applications: the African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI) and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO). These two organisations cover 27 countries and greatly facilitate the process of applying for and protecting trademarks in Africa.

ARM Holdings, a Cambridge-based internet technology company that designs chips and holds the title as the UK’s only global-scale tech company and is also listed in the FTSE 100 has accepted a takeover offer by the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank for $31.4 billion.

Following several months of uncertainty and speculation, the trans-Atlantic agreement between the European Union and the United States of America has been officially adopted on Tuesday the 12th of July, 2016.

Past April 20th, 2016 the Rwandan government has released an Official Gazette Special.

This important document, drafted in Kinyarwanda, French and English, makes effective recently promulgated laws and modifies various IP laws. The main changes are the following:

It is official, as from today, (27/05/16) José Mourinho is officially Manchester United’s new manager. An announcement such as this would normally call for a celebration for “sealing the deal”, but for the executives responsible for the transfer there is still unsettled issues that need to be pondered and addressed.

Founded in 2010 by the entrepreneur Lei Jun, Xiaomi is one of China’s largest mobile brands, just recently announced a licensing deal of around 1,500 patents from the software-giant Microsoft. Pundits suggest this move is an effort to expand from China into western markets.

The Sixty-eighth session of the World Health Assembly (WHA) took place in Geneva 18–26 May 2015. One of the issues that have been addressed was the high prices of medicines in Europe. Actually this is a growing problem in the EU. In the past few years the price of the medicines have been increasing exceeding the ability of the patients to pay for it. It is enough to recall the recent case involving the drugs to treat hepatitis C (HCV) which have an unsustainable price when compared to previous generation treatments.