The Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court has refused as inadmissible applications by law firms Mathys & Squire and Bristows to intervene in an appeal concerning public access to documents filed with the Court. As is explained in a press release of Mathys & Squire, in October ‘the UPC’s Nordic-Baltic regional division granted…

On 20 December 2023, the UK Supreme Court handed down its highly anticipated judgment in the case of Thaler v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks [2023] UKSC 49, unanimously ruling that only a natural person can be named as an inventor on a patent application.  In doing so, the Supreme Court upheld the decisions…

On December 12, 2023, the President of the BRPTO gave a normative and binding character to four Opinions of the Specialized Federal Attorney’s Office, imposing restrictions on the actions available to applicants when appealing first instance decisions. Particularly, the Opinion limits the provisions of the Brazilian Patent Statute which guarantee the “full devolutive effect”. Similarly…

The facts of the case On 21 November 2023, Sir Anthony Mann of the London High Court handed down a judgment in the case of Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch). This judgment addressed the question whether artificial neural networks (ANNs) are excluded subject matter…

A recently published ruling of the Presidium of the Court for Intellectual Rights may turn the issue of cascading divisional applications upside down and endanger many patents granted on such applications. Background A divisional patent application is a separate one that is derived from an initial (parent) application. The necessity of filing such a divisional…

An earlier post on case law on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in India looked at decisions published until 2021. This very comment updates the analysis by covering more recent cases occurred in the latest two years, specifically focusing on the availability of interim injunctive relief for SEP owners and FRAND terms. In the recent proceedings…

The requirement for immediate and complete substantiation of a request for re-establishment corresponds to the principle of “Eventualmaxime/ Häufungsgrundsatz/ le principe de la concentration des moyens”, according to which the request must state all grounds for re-establishment and means of evidence without the possibility of submitting these at a later stage. Dynamic interpretation of the…

In a detailed and impeccably written decision, the Madrid Court of Appeal (Section 32) has ruled in the raloxifene case, awarding damages in the high seven figure region. This is a landmark decision which is likely to shape patent infringement claims and damage quantification, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector. The decision has important implications for…

Substantial evidence supported a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision finding the challenged claims were obvious. A PTAB decision finding that Sony Interactive Entertainment had shown that a Bot M8’s patent directed to a video game authentication system was obvious over prior art has been affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the…

There was no error in an inter partes review decision finding obviousness in a communication system patent because the board properly relied on materials in the record in its claim construction and obviousness analysis. An inventor of a communication system failed to show any error in an IPR proceeding which found his invention obvious, the U.S. Court…