Current Trends in English IP Law - a series of lectures by Professor Gaetano Dimita
International Laboratory for Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law organized a series of lectures "Current trends in English Intellelctual Property Law." The guest speaker - Gaetano Dimita, Professor of Queen Mary University, London.
On November, 24-26 Gaetano Dimita presented a series of lectures on English IP Law. Professor Dimita is a co-director of the Master program «Intellectual Property Law» at the Queen Mary University, where he is a lecturer on international and comparative copyright and related rights, and law in the entertainment industry.
The first part of lectures was devoted to the basics of intellectual property law in the United Kingdom: the statute of Queen Anne in 1709, which began the history of copyright and related rights as copyright was designed exclusively for the protection of "printing and reprinting of books" to the European Union Directives in particular, Directive 2001/29 / EC, known as the information society Directive, which constitute a legal basis to date. The lecturer noted that currently there is no clear answer about the future use of existing EU legislation in the field of intellectual property after Brexit.
The subject list of intellectual activity's results, which are granted legal protection, is a closed list – this is one of the features of the UK law. According to the lecturer, this approach faces lot of discussion and criticism. The Court of Justice of European Union deals with questions of qualification of new facilities, due to which in each case judges must use creative approach in the interpretation of legal definitions.
A separate topic was the consideration of the «making available» right, which sets up new issues in practice in the context of dissemination of works on the Internet. Professor paid attention to the legal basis of this issue, considered separately so-called WIPO Internet treaties which establish international norms aimed at preventing unauthorized access to works and use of these works on the Internet.
The final lecture was devoted to the law in the entertainment industry, namely, to protection of intellectual property rights in video games. A detailed analysis of the problem of game cloning was presented by the example of the case 'Nova Productions Ltd v Mazooma Games Ltd' (2006). Under the guidence of theProfessor the students ried to determine legal qualification of the video game and to understand what possible legal means could have been used to ensure adequate protection of intellectual property of a complex object.
Author: Elena Buyantueva