Dutch operators are going to invest in extra base stations to cope with the "Elfstedentocht". This is a skating competition organised in the north of the Netherlands as soon as the ice on the canals between 11 pre-determined cities is thick enough to endure the weight of the skating competitors. As this winter has been cold enough, this is expected to happen soon. Last time the competition was organised was in 1997. Apparently the three largest providers are going to let each other roam on each other's base stations so as to keep costs of investments down. Let's hope they make it a lasting practise and that they also consider inviting virtual operators to share the joy!
On a very unrelated note, BusinessWeek doubted in 2007 whether cars are protected by intellectual property rights. German courts blocking Chinese BMW-lookalike imports last year call a resounding "yes", which maybe isn't surprising but the result of having cars "rotting in Rotterdam" is a dubious waste of resources. Just in the event that anyone is interested, design rights in parts for cars is (was) actually a very controversial issue when the EU made their design rights directive. It's not likely to get updated soon, but a slightly worrying tendency in design rights is for large companies, like Apple in their design wars with Samsung, to make simultaneous design right and copyright claims in lawsuits. Optimally, we'd get some political criticism of this moving of industrial design interests, unsuitable for unregistered rights at the best of times, into copyrights instead of keeping it a theoretical, legal debate (<-- look, I provide!).
I'm not surprised of claims of copyright on things normally considered design rights. There is overlapping in those rights and they provide different kinds of protection. It's actually standard recommendation from experts on immaterial protection to seek all kinds of protection.
A common strategy is to try to get some patents on functionality, some design rights on patterns, register trademarks based on significant design elements and to claim copyright on everything that you can possibly get away with.
The best example of something that can easily be protected in all these ways are complex molecules, like for example RNA and DNA. A designed RNA molecule would be patentable for its unique function, could get design rights because it is a pattern, its shape is distinct enough to be used as a logo and thus can be trademarked. And, since RNA is fundamentally similar to program code its covered by copyright as long as its unique.
A very valid question is, do we really need 4 different kinds of protection for the same thing? Isn't trademarks really the only kind of protection thats needed? Trademarks can protect anything with a unique identity and does so mostly because of fundamental psychological traits in humans. At the same time trademarks offer mutual protection for consumers because it provides a level of protection from fraud.
Do you have examples of all those four kinds of rights being applied to RNA/DNA molecules (or any other molecules for that matter) by actual biochemical companies, or is it just a hypothetical situation?
While from a superficial observation all those rights may seem to cover the same "thing", they are designed to cover only certain aspects of the product in question. In an ideal case, those aspects are not supposed to overlap each other. For instance, the Swedish Trademark Act excludes the physical form of the product from trademark protection if that form is due to the very nature of the product or is required for it to serve its intended purpose. A similar exclusion can be found in the Swedish Designs Protection Act. The proper function of a product, if there is one, is instead meant to be covered by patent rights, if such have been awarded.
Also, I wouldn't regard a chemical molecule a good example of something that could be protected by design rights. According to the (Swedish) law, any design must remain "visible" during normal use of the product; you can't protect the inside of a combustion engine in this fashion unless you make it out of glass or some other transparent material so that the engine operator or driver can enjoy its appearance. The form of a molecule is invisible to humans unless you use an electron microscope or similar device all the time.
You can of course use the shape of the molecule as the basis for a trademark, but then you would typically add some non-essential design elements to make that trademark unique to your product line. I doubt an enlarged three-dimensional model of the actual molecule would be acceptable as a trademark, but a two-dimensional rendering from a particular angle could perhaps be.
Copyright: Well, maybe, but if there is one and only one molecular structure that would serve the intended purpose, then I would say there is no room for artistic creativity. You won't be entitled to copyright to the written representation of some numerical constant of nature merely because you decide to express it using a base nobody considered before, like 17. DNA molecules happen to allow for some variation in code to produce the very same proteins, but then you would have a non-functional aspect separate from the functional one, thus allowing you to encode quotes from Shakespeare using the extra bits available. If those bits are neither read by humans or used in some chemical process, what's the point of trying to assert exclusive rights to them? They don't matter.
I'm not for a wider application of trademark laws with regards to anything. In fact, case law from many European jurisdictions indicate that trademark law is applied too widely - what happens when we no longer know whether something, the same thing (not just the same object, but the exact same feature of that object), is protected both by copyright and a trademark? It means that a company which loses a case on one ground can just go to process again over the exact same thing but indicating a different type of infringement!! In general, the registered rights are good because they are more predictable - maybe this is why the ECJ, for instance, expands trademark law so vividly? When I wrote about design rights for a university course last year I found that actually they're not so useful for industry, and this is probably also proven by the fact that in the Apple/Samsung cases, Apple made simultaneous copyright claims when claiming design right infringements (the court dismissed the copyright claims based on a previous dismissal from an American court, which was not challenged by Apple with regard to EU law).
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