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Category Archives: Patents
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…)
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…)
EPO Guidelines 2Day Roadshow – Review Part 1 – Rule 164 and General Changes
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 the changes to the rule 164 procedure and also some of the fee related changes. (more…)
Italy has now joined the unitary patent
As previously reported Italy had formally requested to join the unitary patent. We’ve now heard (thanks to ipcopyreader Giuseppe Colucci) that Italy’s request to join the system has now been processed and Italy has become the 26th member of the enhanced cooperation group on unitary patent protection (Spain and Croatia are the two EU countries missing from the club). (more…)
Whose patent is it anyway? (ORoPO)
The statement: “We just want to look into the ownership of company X’s patents and then maybe assign them over after the deal” seems fairly innocuous. But, anyone who has ever worked through a due diligence exercise or even just been asked to assign a few IP assets from A to B knows that IP ownership can get difficult quickly.
One particular issue is whether it’s possible to trust the public record. Is the IP asset owned by company A or did they assign it away at some point in the past to company C who just hasn’t gotten round to updating the register?
This potential lack of accuracy in patent records is now being addressed by the ORoPO project which is a free and open register of patent ownership. (more…)
EPO putting applications in the renewal grace period on hold?
The EPO apparently has a new internal procedure that debuted at some point in the last year which applies when a European patent application enters the six-month grace period for payment of an overdue renewal fee. Once this happens the case file is apparently put on hold so that the Examiner is unable to work on it until the renewal fee has been paid.
IPcopy has heard that a colleague recently tried to briefly discuss a case with an Examiner to see if the claims looked in good shape from the Examiner’s point of view and also when the next exam report might issue. However the case in question was in the grace period for the renewal payment and so the Examiner was prevented from even opening the file to answer what were relatively basic questions. (more…)
Unitary patent and UPC update – September 2015 (Part Two)
Here’s another brief update on all things Unitary patent/UPC.
UK UPC Taskforce
The UK’s UPC Taskforce issued another status update last week. The next Preparatory Committee meeting is scheduled for 19 October.
The Expert Panel of the Preparatory Committee have had a presentation on the IT system and there has also been discussion of the feedback from the court fee consultation. It is also noted that a Code of Conduct is being developed for representatives and proposals for this are being developed with representatives from EPLAW, EPLIT and epi. (more…)
Top 10 Technology Trends (as predicted by a patent database)
With the news that now even drones are going ‘mini’ we have been considering some of our other favourite top trending technologies of the past few years, and briefly looking at how their patent application numbers have progressed.
We should point out that no in-depth analysis has been done here, and we’ve simply performed some quick patent database searching with the phrases used in our titles for our favourite top trending technologies…
- Genomics
No one can deny the importance of studying genetic codes. Genomics not only provides a wealth of information about organisms, but has created vast possibilities for the future of modern medicine.
IPcopy 