Our approach to IP must change

Ian Hargreaves

Amid a troubled August in the UK, with riots at home and job threats from a deteriorating Eurozone, you may have missed the government’s response on 3 August to the review of intellectual property issues led by me and delivered to the government at the beginning of May [see link below].

The review, completed to a tight, six-month timetable, confined itself to 10 recommendations, making the point that the UK’s approach to intellectual property needs a strategic course correction: not a U-turn, but let’s say a 25 degree shift. A government that sets such a revised course can sustain a reforming approach over several years. This is necessary in IP because of the international legal complexity involved in change, along with the certainty that the digital revolution has nowhere near yet run its course.