IP in the news

Works by thousands of authors also including Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami and Jonathan Franzen fed into models run by firms including Meta and Bloomberg

Zadie Smith, Stephen King, Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante are among thousands of authors whose pirated works have been used to train artificial intelligence tools, a story in The Atlantic has revealed.

More than 170,000 titles were fed into models run by companies including Meta and Bloomberg, according to an analysis of “Books3” – the dataset harnessed by the firms to build their AI tools.

Everything is pink: The record-setting box office opening of the Barbie movie came with an inescapable wave of Barbie products – from costumes, cosmetics, pens, soft drinks, to a Barbie dreamhouse for rent. As part of an extensive marketing strategy that leverages Barbie's unique brand, Mattel has engaged in over 100 partnerships to celebrate the iconic doll, and make the most of the film's release for them and their partners.

A new study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) indicates that while Europeans are growing wary of counterfeits and illegal content, price remains a deciding factor as young consumers are more likely to find it acceptable to buy fakes.

In May 2022, the first legal graffiti wall was opened on a concrete wall of the Pärnu Highway viaduct. On 15 July, experienced artists and young art lovers also covered the old wall at 2 Paljassaare Road, Tallinn, with their art.

Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, has become the first book written in Bulgarian to win the International Booker prize.

Chair of judges Leïla Slimani described Time Shelter as “a brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy”, and added: “It is a very profound work that deals with a contemporary question and also a philosophical question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?”

The first time I played the tabletop game Fiasco, it wasn’t the story my friends and I made that blew me away. It was the realization that I had just experienced the limitless possibilities of collaborative writing, that the novels I loved featured just one way their narratives could have played out. Alice could have transformed the Mad Tea Party into Wonderland’s first organic tea shop. Don Quixote could have devolved into a windmill-killer for hire.

The World Intellectual Property Day is celebrated every year on April 26. The global campaign offers a unique annual opportunity to join with others around the globe to celebrate inventors and creators around the world and to explore how IP contributes to a thriving music and arts scene and drives the technological innovation that helps shape our world.

In 2023, we celebrate the “can do” attitude of women inventors, creators and entrepreneurs around the world and their ground-breaking work.

Mondelez International Inc., the US parent company that owns the chocolate brand, is moving some of Toblerone’s production to Slovakia, meaning that the chocolate will not comply anymore with the Switzerland’s legal definition of “Swissness”.

In 2017, Switzerland indeed approved a law to protect “Swissness”. Accordingly, milk and dairy products labelled “Made in Switzerland” must have 100% of their raw materials sourced from within the country. However, there are exceptions for raw materials that cannot be produced in Switzerland (such as cocoa).

Pardon me: an e-…what?

According to the definition in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, an esport is “a video game played as a competition for people to watch as entertainment”. Albeit with some approximation, this definition captures the essence of the phenomenon and helps us introduce this first very important point: any videogame (whether it’s a virtual simulation of a traditional sporting activity or not) can be an esport.

This year's theme for the International Women’s Day is “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.” Intellectual Property (IP) offices and organizations around the globe are coming together to support diversity within our offices and organizations and across the IP system.