Lewis Hamilton's IP Struggles Highlight Some Important Issues

Celebrity news can sometimes cause fringe but nonetheless important issues to come to the fore.  This has been the case recently where Lewis Hamilton's brushes with IP have highlighted a couple of interesting points.

A first piece of news concerned Hamilton's brush with US patent litigation, where he had bizarrely been included as a defendant in a patent infringement case relating to the Halo" safety system.  Inventor Jens Nygaard  brought this action against a number of organisations including various F1" racing teams, and included both Hamilton and fellow F1 driver Charles Leclerk as defendants.  The case against both Hamilton and Leclerk was recently dismissed by the judge following submissions that the case against them fell under the customer suit exception.  This exception is designed to protect individual end users from the risks of patent infringement in the US.  It probably didn't however protect the drivers from not insignificant costs in defending their