Home » Articles posted by ipcopymark (Page 27)
Author Archives: ipcopymark
Fieldfisher Seminar Review: Alice v CLS Bank
As noted earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending Fieldfisher’s recent Patent Experts Seminar on 10th July. The seminar comprised contributions from guest speakers including Frank L. Bernstein from Kenyon & Kenyon LLP in the US who spoke to the issue of Alice v CLS Bank (Alice v. CLS Bank: Through the Looking Glass, or Through a Glass Darkly?). (more…)
Trunki Revisited (or “Peter Jones, Dragon not Patent Attorney”)
Image from dullhunk* (via Flickr) under Creative Commons (click for licence)
Dragon’s Den returned to our screens last night and this therefore seemed like the perfect time to summarise one of the talks given at Fieldfisher’s recent Patent Experts Seminar on 10th July in their fabulous new offices overlooking the Thames.
In the opening session of the seminar David Knight looked over the recent Trunki decision (PMS’s Kiddee case versus Magmatic’s Community Registered Design (CRD) for the Trunki – see image below). While reviewing a design case in the context of a patent seminar seemed a little strange at first it ultimately proved to be an interesting take on the Trunki story and made us look at the position, assumed by one of the Dragons, that the product was not patentable.
Setting the scene David noted that designs protect how “it” looks whereas patents will protect how “it” works. When the Trunki design was originally presented to the Dragons back in 2006 they all decided against investing in the product after Theo Paphitis managed to break the strap on one of the suitcases. During the course of the grilling that inventor Rob Law received he was told by Peter Jones (the tall dragon) that “This type of product is not patentable…..I could have a competing product on the market within 7 days”. But how accurate was this patentability assessment? (more…)
European Patent Litigation Certificate – Response to Consultation
The Legal Working Group of the Preparatory Committee has recently launched a consultation on their proposals for the European Patent Litigation Certificate. The consultation timeframe is relatively short and runs until Friday 25 July 2014. Comments are to submitted electronically to secretariat@unified-patent-court.org. The consultation document can be found here and an explanatory memorandum can be found here.
At a recent CIPA seminar The Hon Mr Justice Birss suggested that the best way to influence the Prep Committee’s position on the content and form of the EPLC would be to present a united front with other countries in Europe. To that end IPcopy would be interested to hear from readers in other countries, e.g. Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, regarding their reaction to the content of the EPLC proposal. Additionally if any reader wants to share their response to the consultation then IPcopy will be happy to start a consultation round-up post.
The comments below form the basis of this ipcopywriter’s response to the EPLC consultation. These are personal views.
Unitary patent and Unified patent court – Conference Review (Part III)
This post covers the afternoon sessions from the “Unitary patent and the Unified patent court” conference in Paris on 4 July. This post covers a session from a number of European judges on the UPC and views from some IP intensive companies (such as Google, Microsoft and GSK). [Part I and Part II cover sessions (1) through (4).] (more…)
Unitary patent and Unified patent court – Conference Review (Part II)
As noted yesterday, I attended the 2nd annual conference on the “Unitary patent and Unified patent court” held in Paris on 4 July. The report of the early morning sessions ((1) and (2)) from this conference can be found in yesterday’s post. Today’s post takes in the sessions ((3) and (4)) between the mid-morning break and lunch (Ratification update and a keynote speech from Margot Fröhlinger). (more…)
Unitary patent and Unified patent court – Conference Review (Part I)
Last week on 4 July I had the good fortune to attend the 2nd annual conference on the “Unitary patent and Unified patent court” held in Paris.
The strapline for the conference was “The Patent Revolution is ON” which was an effort to highlight the most significant change in European patent law in 40 years or so. In reality, as many of the panelists were keen to point out, the unitary patent system represents a modification of the existing systems and should be perhaps viewed as an evolution rather than revolution.
There was a significant amount of ground covered at the one day event and many of the panelists at the conference are people who are actually involved in bringing the new patent system into being. We had judges from around Europe as well as members of the both the EPO Select Committee and the Preparatory Committee.
Given the ground covered I’m going to go session by session to highlight the issues that were discussed. (more…)
Unitary patent: Spanish Challenge Update
As reported here previously, Spain is challenging both of the regulations that create the unitary patent. The CJEU heard the action brought by Spain on 1 July 2014 and a report of the hearing has popped up on an Allen & Overy eAlert (Luisa Deas from A&O was at the CJEU hearing).
The full report from Allen & Overy can be found here but a few notable points are highlighted below. (more…)
London Tech Week 2014 – Top patent issues
Keltie took part in London Technology Week between 16 and 20 June. We ran an IP seminar and held a number of IP clinics throughout the week and we’d like to say thank you to everyone that came along to the seminar and signed up to one of the clinics.
We discussed many patent, trade mark and design related issues throughout the week but a number of common themes kept cropping up which we thought we’d revisit in a blog post. Today’s post focusses on the patent related issues that we discussed. (more…)
Unitary patent system & EPO strikes – questions in the European Parliament
Marc Tarabella is a Member of the European Parliament (see his biography here). Back in October 2013, he asked a question of the Commission relating to the possibility that “patent trolls” could soon arrive en masse in Europe thanks to the incoming unitary patent system. As noted on IPKat this question resulted in a slightly sniffy response from Commissioner Barnier which started by saying “The Commission fails to see how the recent Union legislation on patents, namely Regulations 1257/2012 and 1260/2012, could increase the activity of so called ‘patent trolls’ in Europe.”
It would seem Mr Tarabella has not been put off by the previous response he received and he’s recently asked more questions about the unitary patent system. It should be noted that Mr Tarabella generally appears to be something of a Parliamentary Questions Factory with, currently, 1229 questions on various topics to his name!
All three of Mr Tarabella’s questions were asked on 17 April 2014. (more…)
Unitary patent: Nuggets of News
Some unitary patent related news bites today relating to the ratification process and some articles from Ingve Stjerna on the background to the unitary patent package.
Dr Ingve Björn Stjerna is a German attorney operating in the area of patent litigation. Ingve has been following the progress of the unitary patent system with a keen eye and may be familiar to readers as the author of the articles: “Law-making in camera, article on the doubtful understanding of transparency and democracy in the legislative process for the “unitary patent” package” and the optimistically titled “The “sub-sub-suboptimal compromise” of the EU Parliament, article on the Special Meeting of the Legal Affairs Committee on 19 November 2012”.
Ingve has recently dropped IPcopy a couple of notes to highlight a couple of new entries on his website. (more…)
IPcopy 