IP Exam Revision

1. Intellectual Property rights are private rights provided for and protected by intellectual
property laws in recognition of the creator's works and inventions. True or false? Justify
your response.
True, creators’ rights to their work and inventions can only be protected thru the
enactment of IP laws. IP law encourages innovation, inventiveness, and creativity.
2. The right to copyright over an owner's works will only exist once he or she registers their
copyright works in a government copyright registry. True or false? Justify your response.
True, a copyright must be first registered to receive protection from the law or
copyright legislation of a respective country in the Pacific.
3. A monopoly granted by a patent to an inventor of a new invention lasts the inventor a
lifetime plus 50 years after his or her death. True or false? Justify your response.
False, duration for patent rights usually lasted 20 years and after the 20 years, it
enters the public domain.
4. Trademark protections only last for 10 years and cannot be renewed. True or false?
Justify your response.
False, duration of protection for trademark is 14 years and may be renewed for
another 14 years.
5. Translations, adaptations, arrangements, and other transformations or modification of
works or works created from existing works such as dramatization, motion picture, sound
recording are all derivative works. True or false? Justify your response.
True,
6. Plants and animals and biological processes, discovery of materials or substances already
existing in nature are patentable. True or false? Justify your response.
False, Article 27 of the TRIPPS exclude the patentability of plants, animals, and
biological processes, discovery of materials or substances already existed in nature.
7. Where two persons have invented the same or similar invention independently of each
other the right to a patent for the invention will go to the person who filed the application
first or at the earliest priority date. True or false? Justify your response.
True,
8. The internet has no borders and passes quality information freely and instantaneously all
over the world; this currently makes it almost difficult for law enforcers to trace and
punish copyright violators. True or false? Justify your response.
 True, this is an existing challenge to copyright law because property can be
infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed over the internet without
copyright protection.
9. The type of peer-to-peer file-sharing system developed on the internet meant that it had
no centralized directory. Users could find each other, and copy and re-distribute films and
sound recordings to each other's hard-drives, but they could not be controlled. This form
of sharing copyright works on the internet is secondary infringement by the Internet
Service Provider. True or false? Justify your response.
True, peer-to-peer file sharing system is an example of secondary infringement as
established in the case of A&M Record, Inc v Napster (2001).
10. The Trade Related Intellectual Properties (TRIPs) Agreement regulates trading with
goods and services around the world. True or false? Justify your response.

11. Indigenous intellectual property systems have not been well documented and recognized
by the governments of the South Pacific Countries and, therefore, are not included as a
source of Intellectual Property laws. True or false. Justify your response.
False, South Pacific countries like Vanuatu enacted legislations that protect the
expression of traditional knowledge and expression that are also considered as
intellectual property rights.
12. Intellectual property laws protect the rights of an object, but not the actual physical
existence of it. True or false. Justify your response.
False, copyright works are protected by IP law regardless of their form of
expression, quality or creation.
13. Speeches, lectures, oral addresses, sermons and other oral works will be protected by
Copyright law, if they are expressed in a written form. True or false. Justify your
response.
False, it must be original to be protected by copyright law.
14. New and inventive steps are the only two most important conditions for successful
application for the Patent Office to award a patent for an invention. True or False. Justify
your response.
False, an invention must be new, inventive, industrially useful or useful, consist
subject matter, and disclosure.
15. Abstractions and scientific theories, plants and animals, biological processes and
computer programs are patentable. True or False. Justify your response.
 False, Article 27 of TRIPPS exclude scientific theories, plants and animals, and
biological processes from being patentable. Computer programs may be patentable
if was a new invention.
16. Collective marks are those marks used by a certification authority that set standards for
particular products, mainly for agricultural products such as kava or copra for export.
True or false. Justify your response.
False, collective mark is member use only if they comply with fixed regulation
relating to the use of mark.
17. An important aspect of a function of trademarks is that it must be descriptive in order
show the quality of the service or product. True or false. Justify your response.
True, trademark must have words that are direct reference to the character or
quality of the goods.
18. Internet Service Provides or ISPs only facilitate the internet systems to function, but are
not responsible for copyright violators who upload works or download works, which are
not theirs. True or false? Justify your response.
False, ISP can be directly liable as a result of copying through thumbnails and
caching.
19. The Trade Related Intellectual Properties (TRIPs) Agreement is a multilateral treaty
between member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has two
underlying principles. The first is the national treatment principle and the second is the
harmonization principle. True or false? Justify your response.
True,

Choose and answer only ONE question (10 marks)

1. What would be the main reasons for the Registrar of Patents to reject a patent
application? Support your answer with reference to legislation and case law.
Vanuatu Patent Act s2(1) provides that an invention is patentable if (a) it is new, (b)
it involves an inventive step, and (b) it is capable of industrial application.
Therefore, by implication an invention may be subject to rejection if it is not new
and it is anticipated by prior art, and it does not involve an inventive step. A claim
involves an inventive step if it not obvious to a person skilled in the art. In
additional, another important requirement to patentability is whether or not the
invention is sufficiently disclosed in the application. If it is not, then it may be
subject to rejection by the registrar. If there is also ‘prior art’ or there is knowledge
 that the invention existed prior to the filing of the application is also a ground for
rejection of the application.
2. Discuss the ways in which the internet has affected the law of copyright by activities of
internet users and what steps would have been taken to mitigate the effects. Support your
response with reference to legislation and case law.
When a copyright protected material is uploaded on the internet by a person who is
not the real owner of the work, he and all who accessed it including the ISP may be
held liable for infringement. However, copyright over the internet raises complex
jurisdictional issues as the laws where the copyright action is being pursued is often
complex and unclear. The law where the copyright work is created may be relevant
in terms of who owns the copyright work; whereas the law where the infringing
occurs may be relevant to punishment of the infringer. This leads to the question of
which court have the jurisdiction over the matter and how the judgement will be
enforced.
Copyright owners are reluctant to pursue individuals who upload or download their
work because instead getting more money, they will lose money. The person that
uploads the work and the person that downloads the work are refer to as end users.
They may be held liable for infringement because they do not have exclusive rights
to reproduced the copyright work when they copy and downloading the works.
However, they may argue that there is implied consent as anyone who upload
material onto the internet is expected to know that there will be enormous copying
of the material over the internet.
The ISP can also be liable for infringement because they also copy work through the
creation of ‘thumbnail’ and ‘cache’. Here, implied consent can also be a defense and
in some modern copyright acts caching is exempt from liability as long as
temporary. This emphasized in the s11 of the Vanuatu Copyright Act where it
provides “that a temporary reproduction is not an infringement if it was a digital
transmission…”
However, it is arguable that ISP and all others may be liable for infringement
through the doctrine of authorization. This simply means that ISP authorized
infringement works because they provide the means to make copies of copyright
works and they knew that infringing copies of work will inevitably be made. This
was emphasized in the CBS songs v Amstrad Consumer Electronic case where the
court reject the argument of authorization doctrine and held that providing the
means of infringement does not amount to authorization. Authorization can only
come from somebody purporting authority because the defendants does not have
control over the use of the cassette which the complainant argued that the cassettes
allow users to copy recordings protected by copy right.
Choose and answer only ONE question (10 marks)
1. Freddy is a post-graduate engineering student at USP, Laucala Campus. He is partly
employed to assist other students in technological experimentation and development of
their engineering skills. During his time at USP, Freddy created a toy car for children,
which utilizes batteries to run and it is guided, remotely. He had used his own resources
and had invented this toy during his own time outside of USP. He decided to patent it at
the Fiji Patent Office. Representatives from USP, his employer, come to you to complain
that the particular invention belonged to USP, because he had invented the toy car during
the course of his employment.
What would be your advice to USP? Support your answer with reference to legislation
and case law.
The facts provide that Freddy had used his own resource to invent the toy car
during his own time. The issue here is whether USP may claim patents rights over
the newly invented toy. In order to resolve the issue, the court would need to
determine whether the invention was done during the course of employment. If the
invention was done during Freddy’s working hours,
2. Joy is a retailer in Honiara. She imports and sells everything from clothing, to electrical
equipment and other accessories. She sells imported T-shirts, which have the local
traditional tattoo designs on them; the designs belong to a local tribe from Malaita. The
chiefs of Malaita come to you to say that they had not given their consent for the use of
their traditional designs on the T-shirts.
What would be your advice?
3. Compare and contrast original works with derivative works under copyright law and
provide examples of the two.
4. What are the exclusive rights which a patent holder has and what are the limitations to
these rights?

Part D
Compulsory question (10 marks)
1. Critically discuss the impact of full implementation of intellectual property rights that
your country would experience nationally as well as within the region.