News
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US & Japan set to join the Hague System
16 February 2015Read more >The Hague System is administered by the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) and allows a single registered design application to be made that can designate several countries, instead of filing separate design applications in multiple countries. On 13 February 2015 the US and Japan will deposit their instruments of accession (by the Geneva Act of […]
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Patentable Parthenotes
12 February 2015Read more >In decision C-364/13 the CJEU classified human parthenotes, the result of artificially stimulating human egg cells to divide, as being outside the definition of embryos. This means that parthenotes, and the stem cells that form them, are not excluded from patent protection by the European Biotechnology Directive. Ethical issues reign over questions of whether the […]
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A new patent eligibility test from the USPTO – a step in the right direction?
10 February 2015Read more >The USPTO has recently issued guidelines for deciding whether a claim is eligible for US patent protection. The guidelines are welcomed by those considering patenting computer-implemented inventions in the US because they clarify the brief and unclear guidance issued shortly after the US Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. v. CLS bank International decision of 19 June […]
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Ruling out the prior art
28 January 2015Read more >The EPO Board of Appeal decision T 1488/10 examines whether or not a feature in a figure of a prior art document can be measured to assert that a claim is not novel, if the figure appears to be to scale. Previous case law on this matter generally indicates that schematic drawings, unlike construction […]
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UK Court of Appeal orders re-trial in Interflora v M&S keyword advertising battle
16 January 2015Read more >In the latest decision in the long-running dispute between Interflora and Marks and Spencer (‘M&S’), which concerns M&S’ use of the INTERFLORA trade mark in internet keyword advertising, the UK Court of Appeal (‘CoA’) has ordered that the case undergo re-trial in the High Court. In doing so, the CoA overturned Mr Justice Arnold’s (‘Arnold […]
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Second medical use claims: time to drop the Swiss?
14 January 2015Read more >In T1570/09, the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) had to decide on a claim set that included both a Swiss-type claim and a purpose-limited product claim under Article 54(5) EPC 2000. The two second medical use claims were formulated as follows (emphasis added). 1. Use of at least one member selected […]
