Member Spotlight: Cyclopic
Reinventing the wheel: How Cyclopic’s centreless wheel system is revolutionising electric vehicles Cyclopic has recently joined the ACT | The App Association to connect with other companies, increase their knowledge of standard-essential patent (SEP) issues and be a part of our shared sector voice. Cyclopic is a pioneering technology company that is revolutionising the electric vehicle (EV) and micro-mobility (small, lightweight vehicles) markets. Founders Allan and Carol Rallings want to change the way we travel by focusing on something common [...]
Update: What tech SMEs should know about Germany’s modernised Patent Act
ACT | The App Association is a long-time advocate of strong intellectual property protections and works hard to include our members’ voices in the relevant policy development processes taking place across the EU. Small tech businesses thrive in environments where they can enjoy legal certainty and which reflect widely accepted fairness principles. However, tech small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have long faced difficulty in Germany. Under the current legal framework, courts issue injunctions against those accused of patent infringement without [...]
Event Recap: Industrial Perspectives on Licensing the Internet of Things
On 15 June 2021, ACT | the App Association held an event covering the fundamental issues companies may experience when trying to license patents in the internet of things (IoT) context. Although Nokia and Daimler reached a licensing agreement, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will, therefore, not give an opinion on the matter, the larger problems remain unsolved. Certain holders of standard-essential patents (SEPs) continue to refuse to grant licences to willing licensees, and potential [...]
Member Spotlight: Loopcycle
Manufacturing businesses often sell their products to customers via third parties or intermediaries. This means there is no direct link between the manufacturer and the end-user. For the manufacturers, this missing link decreases the chances of valuable product recovery for remanufacturing or recycling and makes it harder to foster long-term customer relationships. For the end-users, managing physical assets across multiple sites can lead to losing track of the product inventory. This makes it easier to write off the end-of-life goods [...]
Colorado Joins the State Privacy Patchwork
A little more than three months ago, we wrote about the impending expansion of the state privacy patchwork. At the time, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) was a signature away from becoming law, with promising efforts also underway in Washington and Oklahoma. Now, with VCDPA officially on the books and many state legislative sessions winding down for the year (the Washington and Oklahoma bills eventually failed to pass), the new privacy landscape is coming into focus, but not before [...]
Our Money’s on Broadband in Infrastructure
The broadband industry faces a problem it’s never really had before: it’s awash in federal taxpayer money. But questions remain as to how recipients should spend that money and what we should do when it runs out in the next few years. In the last COVID-19 response bill in late 2020 and then the stimulus bill (the American Rescue Plan or ARP) from early 2021, Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for states to spend on digital equity and [...]