On December 21, 2023, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) issued the final version of the revised Implementing Rules for the Patent Law and the Guidelines for Patent Examination, which will become effective on January 20, 2024. These Regulations complete legislative efforts on changes to the Chinese patent system introduced by the 4th amendment…
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…
As readers will be well aware, one of the preferred hobbies of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) is to issue controversial judgments in intellectual property matters which, quite often, instead of providing guidance to national courts, raise more questions than they answer. After the Christmas break, the CJEU seems to have…
The EPO’s Boards of Appeal are famously strict on added matter. But normally applicants can sleep soundly at night after making amendments based entirely on the original dependent claims having appropriate back references, especially where the amendments still cover the examples. T 1137/21 however might cause some applicants sleepless nights, as the Board found the…
On November 28, 2023, the Tokyo District Court issued a preliminary injunction order against Sawai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (“Sawai”) to suspend the manufacture and sale of Sawai’s pharmaceutical product (“Sawai’s Product”) developed and sold as a generic drug of Bristol-Myers Squibb (“BMS”)’s cancer drug “Sprycel®” (Case No. 2023 (Yo) 30214; AIK represented BMS in this…
The Unified Patent Court, what else? For the patent community 2023 was a historical year. After two decades of hard work and debates, but also delays, court cases, Brexits and other disappointments, the new European patent court finally opened its doors and the Unitary Patent saw the light of day. Unsurprisingly, the new patent system…
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…
Access to documents: How far should we be able to peek behind the curtain? As we move past the first six months of operation of the UPC, those trying to keep track of its jurisprudence – and the judges themselves – are starting to have a busier time of things. We wrote last month as…
Since the start of operations 1 June 2023, the Unified Patent Court has received 160 cases. The court published an overview of the cases last week. The German local divisions are by far the most popular for infringement actions, and the language of 49 percent of the cases is German as well. The local division…
