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UPC Court Fees Consultation Event – the Q&A
Last week saw the London meeting of the joint CIPA/IPO/IP Federation event relating to the consultation on court fees for the Unified Patent Court. Earlier this week IPcopy posted our notes on the event. Today we have some further notes gleaned from the Q&A session that followed the main event. (more…)
UPC Court Fees Consultation London Event (CIPA/IPO/IP Federation)
Last week saw the London meeting of the joint CIPA/IPO/IP Federation event relating to the consultation on court fees for the Unified Patent Court. What follows below are IPcopy’s notes on the event and consultation.
If you are planning on submitting a response to the consultation then you have until midnight 31 July 2015. The consultation document can be found here. Anyone who missed the consultation can take advantage of the video recording of the event here to review what was said. (more…)
Are You Protecting Your Most Valuable Assets? An Introduction to Intellectual Property
Over the next couple of weeks, IPcopy will be republishing some general introduction to IP articles that we prepared to present some topics, facts and issues from the area of intellectual property law for people who have had little or no contact with intellectual property. The articles are designed as (brief) primers to highlight some particular elements of the subject area.
Intellectual property (IP) can sometimes be overlooked. Intellectual assets are not tangible and, as such, can be difficult to value. Often, they are not taken into consideration properly when assessing the worth of a business. However, these assets can be the most important to a business, contributing significantly to its goodwill and reputation, and need to be protected properly. (more…)
Intellectual Property Act – Patents Opinions Service
The Intellectual Property Act 2014 received Royal Assent on 14 May 2014 and makes a number of changes to intellectual property (IP) law in the UK. The provisions of the Intellectual Property Act start to come into force from 1 October 2014. In this post we take a look at the UKIPO’s Patents Opinions Service. (more…)
Unified Patent Court Rules of Procedure Consultation – Submissions Round-up
Updated: Two further consultation submissions added 18 November
Following our recent posts highlighting some of the various rules of procedure consultation submissions that have come to light, more have popped up online. For your ease of reference we thought we’d pull together links to all the submissions we’ve seen in one place. If anyone has come across other submissions then please let us know and we’ll add them to the post.
Inventive step at the UK IPO – Report of CIPA seminar
It is one thing to argue against an inventive step objection. It is quite another thing to construct the inventive step objection in the first place.
That was the premise behind this seminar, in which two experienced examiners from the UK IPO, Stuart Purdy and Andrew Hole, offered the opportunity for attorneys to see patent examination from an examiner’s perspective, in a friendly and accessible manner. (more…)
When is a backlog not a backlog? Joint UK IPO/USPTO research paper published
This is not a pile of paperwork according to the IPO, it’s an “inventory”
The UK IPO and USPTO last week published a working draft report on their joint research effort into the thorny issue of patent backlogs. The UK IPO’s research group ERE has a post about it on their IPO Facto blog.
Before you stifle your yawn, it’s worth noting that the report contains a few unexpected additions to the debate. The first is re-naming “backlogs” as inventories or stocks of applications – they sound better already!
ITMA calls for evidence regarding proposed Chinese Trade Mark Law revisions
The Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) is in the final stages of a process of revision of the Chinese Trade Mark Law that – if implemented – should have positive implications for foreign trade mark owners.
Does Every Experiment Need a Test Tube?
The UK Intellectual Property Office has recently launched a consultation entitled “The Research and Bolar Exceptions”. While all patent practitioners may have got as far as the end of the title, the profession will split into two groups after reading the subtitle, “A formal consultation on patent infringement in clinical and field trials”, indicating that this is another exercise in sculpting patent law specifically for the pharmaceutical industry.
This all relates to the interpretation of s.60(5)(b) of the Patents Act 1977, which states that:
“An act which, apart from this subsection, would constitute an infringement of a patent for an invention shall not do so if… it is done for experimental purposes relevant to the subject-matter of the invention;”
Most European countries have a similar provision as a result of the harmonisation in European patent law associated with the creation of the Community Patent and European Patent Conventions in the 1970s. Different countries, however, interpret this provision in quite different ways. The UK courts have interpreted this exception narrowly, leading to widespread concern that the UK is out of step in not having a clear exception for clinical trials.
IPcopy 