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Yearly Archives: 2015
Intellectual Property from a Corporate in-house perspective
It’s easy for a private practice patent attorney to develop a narrow view of the IP world. Essentially:
Draft – File – Prosecute – Grant – Repeat*
It was therefore a pleasure to welcome Donal O’Connell1 to Keltie recently to provide some insight into the world of Intellectual Property from the perspective of the corporate in-house officer. (more…)
Misleading invoices – IP Scammers
We are delighted to report that there has been some good news in the fight against companies/individuals issuing misleading invoices which appear to be from the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) (previous IPcopy articles can be found here).
In this regard, a company trading as Intellectual Property Agency Ltd (IPA) and its director Mr Harri Mattias Jonasson were found liable for trade mark infringement and passing off and ordered to pay £500,000 plus legal costs to the UK IPO. (more…)
Law in the Global Marketplace – Hogan Lovells Annual Patent Conference
Hogan Lovells demonstrated its global reach by holding its annual UK patent conference in London as a joint session with its “Law in the Global Marketplace” conference in California. A presentation on the current status of the UPC was made from London, an update on US patent legislation was made from California, and a transatlantic panel session followed (chaired from London by a German). The session was interesting, and featured a variety of views leading to an open discussion. Highlights follow below. (more…)
UPC Update: Rules of Procedure, IT user testing & UK threats provisions
UPC Update – Rules of Procedure
At the last meeting of the Preparatory Committee, the 18th draft of the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court was adopted.
This 18th draft will, subject to some modifications when the court fees have been decided, form the final version of the Rules of Procedure.
The 18th draft does not comprise too many substantive changes from the previous version (a handy comparison of the two versions can be seen here) but IPcopy notes the following changes: (more…)
The Patent Box Reloaded – Welcome to the Nexus
HM Treasury and HM Revenue and Customs have jointly launched a consultation on proposed changes to the UK Patent Box scheme. The changes are being proposed in order to meet proposals developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to harmonise preferential tax regimes that operate in G20 states.
The consultation runs until 4 December 2015 and sets out the Government’s preferred approach to the new international framework set out by the OECD. The consultation will affect UK business that hold/exploit patents.
Due to some slightly compressed deadlines arising from the OECD, the Government’s plan is to publish proposed legislation in December 2015 and then a response to the consultation in spring next year. The current patent box rules will apparently be modified by legislation in the 2016 Finance Bill.
The consultation document includes some background on the existing Patent Box scheme. The Patent Box, which of course is a tax initiative that seeks to make the UK competitive for high-tech companies, has apparently seen 639 companies taking part so far and receiving benefits that total £335 million. (more…)
UPC: More on the sunrise opt-out register & Taskforce Update
In our post last week we highlighted a story we’d seen that the UKIPO would be responsible for the opt-out register during the sunrise period for the Unified Patent Court and that this register would be transferred to the Court’s registry when the court became active.
We’d not heard of this development before so we reached out to the UPC taskforce team at the UKIPO and asked them about the sunrise period, the opt-out register and the UKIPO’s involvement. (more…)
Avoid jointly owned intellectual property like the plague
Not all the smart people work for you
Traditionally, internal innovation was the paradigm in which most companies operated. Most innovating companies kept their discoveries highly secret and made no attempt to assimilate information from outside their own research and development laboratories. This was driven by the belief that “the smart people in our field work for us”. However, in recent years the world has seen major advances in technology and society, changes which have facilitated the diffusion of information. Companies have also come to realise that “not all the smart people work for us, and that we need to work with smart people inside and outside our company”. (more…)
UPC: Protocol, Opt-out, Start Date and Survey
IPcopy has been busy with reviewing the EPO Guidelines recently and so we are now belatedly reporting a few unitary patent items of interest: the signing of the Protocol, a firm-ish start date and a survey. (more…)
Invention harvesting
To invent:
To invent means to produce or contrive something previously unknown by the use of ingenuity or imagination. An inventor is therefore someone who invents, someone who devises some new process, appliance, machine, or article. When a new product appears, the person who first thought of it, and who first defined what the product should be, is recognised as the inventor. While many people may be involved in building the product and bringing it to market, the innovator is the person who provided the original idea that helped to define and shape the product.
Inventive ideas can take many forms. They can be disruptive, transformative, radical, breakthrough, incremental or step improvement in nature. They can be product, service, process or business model related. (more…)
EPO Guidelines 2Day Roadshow – Review Part 2 – Early processing, PCT Direct & Rule 71(3)
The EPO is currently running a roadshow for professional representatives around Europe covering changes to the Guidelines for Examination and other matters such as rule 164 EPC, “Doing business with the EPO electronically”, early entry into the European phase, effective use of procedural options, the rule 71(3) EPC procedure and Article 123(2) EPC.
Recently the roadshow made it to London and in this post we take a look at early processing, PCT Direct and rule 71(3) EPC. The first post in this series looked at the rule 164 procedure and some fee related changes. (more…)
IPcopy 