Introduction On 17 July 2023, the English Court of Appeal handed down its decision in a dispute between J.C. Bamford (JCB) and Manitou about the confidentiality of information disclosed in the course of litigation between JCB and Manitou relating to the validity and infringement of certain of JCB’s patents.  At the heart of the confidentiality…

In certain technological fields, it is necessary to choose a solution and adopt it as a standard. Imagine, for example, if each electronic device came with a different socket-outlet format or if each airport in the world used a different communication system to connect its control tower with airplanes. It would be catastrophic or, at…

On 27 January 2022, the Spanish Supreme Court handed down a very interesting judgment dealing with a dispute surrounding the ownership of a patent application that claims a system to produce domestic hot and cold water. Judgments dealing with patent ownership are very scarce in Spain. Hence the interest of this case, the background to…

Although a silent technological revolution is currently taking place in the tobacco industry, there is no publicly available data on patents that read on tobacco harm-reduction technologies. We recently conducted a patent analysis and found that, in the developing world, there are only few patents filed relating to tobacco harm reduction. This stands in stark…