By: Shweta Mohandas
Since March 23rd 2016, the Office of Harmonization of Internal Market is called European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the Community Trademark is called European Union Trademark. The changes don’t stop there, the Regulation (EU) No 2015/2424, brings about a change (for the better) starting with the fee structure.
By: Shweta Mohandas
The evolution of tattoos is interesting; it was the during the voyages for the discovery of new worlds that the Europeans came across the Aboriginals of the Pacific having these permeant designs of themselves. These later became a rage in Europe, which died down to be used by criminals as well as the justice system to brand criminals with tattoos as a form of punishment and shame. Even later it became a sign of freedom of expression and is considered now almost a norm than an exception. At the end of the day tattoos are a work of art and expression of the artist just that the canvas is a person’s skin.
By: Lorna Cropper
Big Bang Data is the name of an exhibition currently running at Somerset House, London which has been extended until 20 March 2016 due to popular demand. The exhibition shows data in all its guises and how its collection has evolved over history. From Florence Nightingale’s used of data visualisation techniques in the Crimea War that showed how more members of the British Army died from sickness related to the lack of cleanliness rather than their wounds and other causes to today’s explosion of data via technology and digital platforms such as GPS signals from mobile phones, wearable devices and social media sites.
A popularly cited statistic which embodies the exponential growth of data is that in the two years preceding 2013 more than 90% of the world’s data was produced with an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated each day.[1] Given these incredible numbers the exhibition reflects on how this data is transferred, collected and used. The exhibition’s first installation, Internet Machine by Timo Arnall, captures how the Internet functions. Another early exhibit of a world map displays all the cables under the sea that provide global Internet connectivity, above which hang photos of cloud providers’ data centres such as Google’s in Hamina, Finland. As computing power increases and the cost of storing data falls the world’s total data capacity is enormous and becoming somewhat infinitesimal.
By: Cansu Caglar
After a long legislative process, it seems that Turkey will pass a law on data protection in the near future setting out comprehensive rules governing the processing of personal data.
At the moment, there is no specific privacy and data protection regulation in Turkey. Data protection is rather regulated under the general provisions of other laws such as the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish Criminal Code, the Turkish Civil Code. However, a Draft Law on Personal Data Protection (the “Draft Law”) has been prepared to ensure protection during the processing of personal data.
By: Ningxin Xie
Since last year, SAIC and Alibaba were fighting against each other on social media after SAIC released a white paper on Alibaba’s problems, including the high percentage of forged products. There was a user protest in 2011 against fee hike, which is claimed to be one of Alibaba’s measures to combat counterfeits. In response to these, Alibaba said they wanted to balance the right of brand owners and users. This Article tries to examine (i) why Alibaba gives new hope to brand owners, (ii) whether potential measures implemented by Taobao – one of Alibaba’s main competitors – are in line with national law, and (iii) the further steps to tackle counterfeiting.
In4Me, legal blog 