IP Word of the Day

Perpetual copyright can refer to a copyright without a finite term, or to a copyright whose finite term is perpetually extended. Perpetual copyright is highly uncommon, as the current laws of all countries with copyright statutes set a standard limits on the duration. Special legislation is required for granting a perpetual copyright to a specific work. In many countries, moral rights, which may be covered under the copyright law, can last perpetually.

A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention. Generally speaking, a patent provides the patent owner with the right to decide how - or whether - the invention can be used by others. In exchange for this right, the patent owner makes technical information about the invention publicly available in the published patent document.

Copyright (or author's right) is a legal term used to describe the rights that creators have over their literary and artistic works. Works covered by copyright range from books, music, paintings, sculpture, photos, and films, to computer programs, databases, advertisements, maps, and technical drawings.

IPR-intensive industries are the industries where the companies hold intellectual property rights most often, such as patents, trade marks and designs. See the latest European Patent Office and EUIPO report on this subject.

While often used to refer to recent work, modern art actually specifically refers to work created between the 1860s and 1970s and therefore includes a range of very different genres from Pop Art to Cubism and Expressionism.

ALICE – which stands for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, an acronym that could have been lifted straight out of an episode of The X-Files – was developed and launched by creator Dr. Richard Wallace. A.L.I.C.E.  also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program.

"Patent trolls" are patent owners (often investors who buy patents cheaply from failed companies) who use these rights to threaten companies with infringement actions and interlocutory injunctions, forcing them into financial settlements to avoid expensive litigation. Such threats can potentially affect an entire industry sector.

“P in a circle” is the copyright symbol used for phonograms (sound recordings) embodied in phonorecords such as CDs, cassette tapes, LPs etc. The ℗ stands for a copyright, which is distinct from the general work. It applies only to that particular phonogram and not to any other versions of it even if performed by the same author within the same work. 

The Eurovision AI Song Contest is an international competition exploring the use of AI in the songwriting process. Teams consisting of musicians, researchers, data scientists, developers and anyone else working on or interested in the combination of music and AI create a 4-minute song using AI as part of their songwriting process. Learn more about the contest on https://www.aisongcontest.com/about

"Authenticities" is an initiative designed to empower authorities at a local level to engage citizens and partner organisations across the EU in the fight against counterfeiting, with a view to creating a European Network of Authenticities. The project has been launched by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), in the framework of its European Cooperation activities and the Strategic Plan 2025.

There are currently four European cities that are part of the network of Authenticities. These cities are: Thessaloniki and Mykonos, in Greece, and Sofia and Plovdiv, in Bulgaria. Various other EU cities are in the process of joining the network.