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Superfast Patent Processing: Government response
Need for speed? UK decides not to “Be more dog”
As reported here on 22 April, the UKIPO opened a consultation on a new accelerated prosecution service dubbed “superfast”. The intention of this service was to offer a premium accelerated prosecution service in addition to the free acceleration services currently available, which can already bring the time taken to obtain a UK patent to less than a year.
The Government has now publised their response to the consultation which can be found here. Not unsurprisingly, a number of concerns were raised and the Government has decided not to go ahead with the proposal.
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game [Updated: 12 August 2013]
[Update (12.8.13) – Austria has apparently deposited its instrument of ratification. The Info graphic and State of Play text below have been updated.]
As discussed in our Q&A post on the unitary patent package, the unified patent court agreement requires 13 or more participating member states to ratify the agreement before the unitary patent system can get up and running. Furthermore, three of those 13 member states need to be France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
We will be following the ratification process here on IPcopy but thought we’d try and do so via the medium of football and info graphics.
So, without further ado here’s the process of ratification re-imagined in the form of a (wildly stretched) football analogy. The European team “UPP United” (Unitary Patent Package) are at the ground for their match against the Rest of the World (an aim of the unitary patent system is to make the European patent system more competitive compared to the systems in the US and Japan). This being a slightly inaccurate analogy the European team will comprise 13 players (instead of the usual 11) and will form up in a 5-5-2 formation! The info graphic is below and more notes are further down the post. We hope you enjoy.
Unitary patent package – Timeline for implementation
The dolly zoom is a camera effect, famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo, in which the background in a shot suddenly appears to change size in relation to the foreground subject matter. Those of you following the implementation of the unitary patent system may have noted that despite the main legislative regulations and agreements being in place the actual “go live” date for the system appears to be performing the legal equivalent of a dolly zoom by disappearing into the distance!
Since the original implementation date was April 2014 but is now being reported as late 2015/2016, we thought we’d take a quick look at the timeline as it appears now.
Trade Mark Tribunal – Fast Track Opposition Procedure at the UKIPO
Back at the beginning of May we looked at a consultation that was running at the UKIPO which sought the views of users and potential users of the UK national trade mark registration system about the introduction of a lower cost “fast track” opposition based on earlier registered or pending marks (see original post here). The consultation closed on 17 May 2013 and the Government’s response was released recently. In this post we take a quick look at the consultation again and the Government’s response.
3D printing – seminar review
On 26 June 2013 Field Fisher Waterhouse held an excellent afternoon seminar on “Developments in UK and EU patent law”. David Knight’s session on 3D printing (“3D Printing – A licence to infringe IP rights?”) was particularly interesting as it looked at the implications for intellectual property rights owners arising from the developing field of 3D printing.
In this post we provide a (hopefully accurate!) recap of David’s talk and a look at the world of 3D printing. (more…)
Unitary patent – The Italian Job
As previously noted on IPcopy here, Italy signed the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court back in February but were not “fully paid” up members of the unitary patent package because they hadn’t joined the enhanced cooperation regime on the unitary patent.
We have previously heard that Italy was considering joining the enhanced cooperation regime but according to a news update here some more positive noises have been heard regarding Italy becoming part of the club. (more…)
The Intellectual Property Bill – Freedom of Information plus Odds and Sods
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
In the fifth part of a series on the Intellectual Property Bill, IPCopy summarises the proposals relating to the Freedom of Information Act plus some other remaining odds & sods that haven’t been covered in the earlier posts. [Note: this post looks at the IP Bill as originally published. We will revisit the IP Bill at a later date to look at amendments introduced in its passage through Parliament.]
Unitary Patent Package – hard-coded bifurcation revisited
In an earlier post we pointed out how the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court appeared, by virtue of Article 47(5), to hard-code or hard-wire bifurcation into the system in instances where a licensee was bringing an infringement action. According to the UPC Article (see below) the defendant would need to start separate proceedings against the patent proprietor in order to challenge the validity of the patent.
In the 15th draft of the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court there were some amendments to Rule 25 (Counterclaim for revocation) which, on the face of it, appear to address this issue. In this post we take a closer look at the changes. (more…)
Social Media Patents – Facebook
A “Facebook”
Recent news stories (Techcrunch, Guardian) have highlighted some patents that have recently granted to Facebook. The three patents mentioned in the articles relate to “Automatic Photo Capture Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition“, “Preferred images from captured video sequence” & “Image selection from captured video sequence based on social components“.
IPcopy has a passing interest in social media related patents (see Twitter articles here) and so we thought we’d take a closer look. (more…)
The Intellectual Property Bill – registered designs
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
In the fourth part of a series on the Intellectual Property Bill, IPCopy summarises the proposals affecting registered design rights and registered Community designs. [This post looks at the IP Bill as originally published. We will revisit the IP Bill at a later date to look at amendments introduced in its passage through Parliament.]
Clauses 5 through 13 of the Intellectual Property Bill relate to Registered Community design or Registered Designs. (more…)
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