China Guiding Cases Project at Stanford Law School: China's Supreme People's Court and IP Intellectual Property Law and Other Jurisprudence

At the SLS (Stanford Law School) Legal Aggregate Blog, Mei Gechlik in A Constructive Way to End the U.S.-China Trade War - Legal Aggregate - Stanford Law School discusses China's IP [Intellectual Property] Guiding Cases and the overall Guiding Cases system, implemented in 2010 in China, writing:

"An Eight-Year System with Some Success

In November 2010, China’s Supreme People’s Court (the “SPC”) established a ground-breaking system in which certain Chinese court judgments are selected and re-issued as Guiding Cases to guide the adjudication of similar subsequent cases and ensure the uniform application of law. To date, approximately 100 Guiding Cases have been released by the SPC. Twenty of these cases address IP (e.g., patents, trademarks, copyrights, rights to new plant varieties), unfair competition, and/or antimonopoly issues and are, unlike many other cases in China, well-reasoned.

In each Guiding Case, the SPC summarizes relevant legal principles, which are, in effect, binding on all courts in China. For example, in Guiding Case No. 84, Lilly Company v. WATSON Pharmaceuticals (Changzhou) Co., Ltd., A Dispute over Infringement of an Invention Patent, the SPC summarized various legal principles, including the following (English translation prepared by Stanford Law School’s China Guiding Cases Project) [link added by LawPundit]: ...."

Read the full story at;

A Constructive Way to End the U.S.-China Trade War - Legal Aggregate - Stanford Law School

Copyrights, Cheese, and Taste Buds: Are Tastes Copyrightable?

Food and fashion are two essential areas of human life (nutrition, clothing) that have been thankfully fairly immune from the far-too-broad octopus-like reach of often errant IP (intellectual property) law.

We can still throw food ingredients of our choice and taste into a frying pan and not be forced to look over our shoulders to check whether or not someone is monitoring somebody's alleged IP rights to food ingredient selection.

The same holds true for clothing and fashion, where we can wear what we want by our own personal taste without fearing that our ensemble selection "belongs" to somebody due to the granting of design patents or other such absurd rights according to our vastly outdated IP laws.

Amie Tsang at the New York Times in Who Has the Copyright Over My Cheese?
reports on a legal case in the European Union’s highest court in which a copyright claim was lodged for a monopoly on the "taste" of a particular cheese spread.

Imagine applying that idea of commercial "taste monopolies" to all foods.
It would be a catastrophe of immense proportions.

Thankfully for humanity, the EU Court of Justice decided for now that "taste" does not qualify for intellectual property protection, and hence, one can presume, the senses of smell and touch would also appear to be off limits to the IP trolls, so that things not invented by man but rather granted to humankind by the Almighty remain in the public domain.

Nevertheless, we have to be on our guard.

The greedy never rest.

From the Yellow Legal Pad to the "Other" Pads

Before the iPad there was "THE Pad". Via TechnoLawyer see iPhoneJD and its iPad Pro review in light of the history of the Yellow Legal Pad, the mother viz. father of all pads. See
https://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2018/11/review-ipad-pro.html