On June 17, 2022, WTO members adopted a waiver to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) allowing suspension of patent related to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is the result of a year and a half of intense debate. Already there is a lot of alarm in the industry about this…
Readers who have followed our last two blog entries and the vast number of comments received, will have seen the following two conclusions surfacing. First, although the UPC ‘s Protocol on Provisional Application, in reality, may not be in force, there is nothing to worry about because there are no police around. Second, there is…
Ahead of their meeting late June, a petition calling for a conference of ministers of contracting states under Article 4a EPC has been sent to the members of the Administrative Council of the EPO. The petition is an initiative of the EPO’s trade union SUEPO, which has invited all staff members to sign it. According…
The Brazilian Patent Office (BRPTO) is improving its examination procedure, trying to reduce the backlog. As more decisions are issued, we are learning about the approach of the examiners to different topics in patent law. An ongoing hot topic is whether the examiners are accepting post-filing experimental evidence during patent examination. The Metallurgy and Material…
Every year the Japan Patent Office (JPO) publishes a status report in spring, and this year’s report (the “Status Report 2022”) was published on March 30, 2022. The Status Report 2022 contains statistics on Japanese and worldwide IP trends, and information on the JPO’s initiatives to protect industrial property rights and to promote innovation. The…
Petitioner expert testimony in inter partes review of a surgical tool patent was more credible than patent owner’s expert that a person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine asserted prior art and would have had a reasonable expectation of success in do so. There was substantial evidence to support the Patent…
The present case relates to the admittance of a new ground for opposition which was raised during the oral proceedings before the opposition division but had deliberately not been decided upon by the opposition division. In the absence of a positive decision on admittance by the opposition division, the Board considered that the ground for…
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…
The judgment addresses the question of whether an employee’s right to additional remuneration from the employer for use of an invention they created depends on whether the employer obtained a patent or – at least – on whether the invention was patentable. The Polish Supreme Court concluded that the employee is entitled to additional remuneration…
The creation of a dedicated administrative tribunal could be a way to improve the settlement of labour disputes at the European Patent Office. Eric De Brabandere, professor of international dispute settlement at Leiden University in the Netherlands said this in an interview with Kluwer IP Law. The tensions at the EPO have risen over the…
