NEWS
Cyber strike forces UK IPO website offl ine
A cyber attack forced the UK Intellectual Property Offi ce (IPO) to temporarily shut down its website. Online services, including those that allow patent and trademark applications to be fi led, were inaccessible over the weekend of October 16.
Matt Navarra, an IPO spokesperson, said: “T e IPO chose to disconnect its website from the Internet following a co-ordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on October 16 at around 18:00 BST.”
T e website operated a limited service on October 18 and 19. T e IPO resumed several of the trademark, patent and design search facilities on October 20, but online fi ling was not possible until October 21, when a full service was resumed.
‘Operation: Payback’, a campaign of action designed to disrupt anti-piracy groups, is believed to be responsible for the DDoS attack. A website linked to the campaign lists the time and date of the attack on its ‘Targets’ page.
According to the website, the attacks are “not the actions of a group of rebellious vandals, but organised protests against the reign of extreme pro-copyright organisations and watchdogs for the entertainment industries”.
T e IPO’s website is now fully operational. Customers can access all of the IPO’s external web services, including application forms and search services.
Navarro said: “As part of our standard network security procedures, our main services were protected prior to the attack. T e website and our internal services suff ered no harm.”
Cyber terrorism was dubbed a tier-one threat by the UK government in a recent report on national security strategy. T e report describes “hostile attacks upon UK cyber space by other states and large-scale cyber crime” as a risk of the “highest priority”.
Organisers of ‘Operation: Payback’ collectively refer to themselves as ‘anonymous’ and are thought to co-ordinate attacks through 4chan, a popular Internet forum that enables users to post messages—that are not moderated or fi ltered by the website—on its ‘Random’, or ‘/b/’, messageboard.
www.worldipreview.com
Supreme Court accepts Stanford / Roche case
T e US Supreme Court will decide on the ownership of patents for methods of testing the eff ectiveness of AIDS treatments by measuring the HIV concentration in blood plasma, it announced on November 1.
T e university fi led a petition with the court in March, attempting to overturn a decision on the issue made by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. T e decision was in favour of Roche Group’s diagnostic and molecular businesses.
Stanford argues that, under the Bayh-Dole Act, which concerns patent rights in inventions made with federal assistance, its rights supersede those of Roche.
In its petition, the university asks “[w]hether a federal contractor university’s statutory right under the Bayh-Dole
Act...in inventions arising from federally funded research can be terminated unilaterally by an individual inventor through a separate agreement purporting to assign the inventor’s rights to a third party”.
T e patents-in-suit were fi led by Stanford University. When they created the invention, Stanford’s scientists were contracted to “promise to assign rights”.
But one of the scientists, Professor Mark Holodniy, had already assigned his rights to future inventions to Cetus Corporation, a molecular diagnostics business, which later became a part of Roche.
T e US Department of Justice (DOJ) has fi led an amicus brief in the Supreme Court, supporting Stanford in its suit against Roche and requesting that the court hear Stanford’s “important question”.
T e DOJ brief said: “Holodniy had no patent rights to assign to Cetus because title to the inventions initially vested in Stanford and Stanford exercised its Bayh-Dole Act rights. T e Court of Appeals’ decision—which holds that Holodniy’s assignment to Cetus limited the patent rights that Stanford could assert under the Bayh-Dole Act—turns the act’s framework on its head.”
World Intellectual Property Review November/December 2010 7
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