In an article for The Times Higher Education, Intellectual property strategists Virginia Driver and Tom Woodhouse have urged universities to guard their IP rights to ensure COVID-19 innovations reach the vulnerable in poorer nations.

When establishing a new brand, it is important to avoid spending time and resources on registering a trade mark brand which is likely to be refused by the Intellectual Property Office.

A recent decision by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) relates to European Patent Convention (EPC) law and provides guidance for software companies seeking to protect an inventive step in a graphical user interface at the European Patent Office (EPO).

Invalidation is the legal procedure which allows anyone to try and remove a trade mark from a register and can relate to the entire registration, or only some of the goods or services covered by the trade mark. This is important if:

Patent attorney Virginia Driver recently gave a presentation to the Bruntwood SciTech Wednesday community, looking at how individual innovators can protect their inventions and creations.

Sometimes you expect something to happen, but it still surprises you when it does occur.

Patent attorney Virginia Driver, who specialises in intellectual property strategy and protection for the tech and electronics sectors, will be presenting at the online Bruntwood SciTech Wednesday event on 15th April.

We hope that you are keeping well and are settling into this new way of working.

It seems that some of the Intellectual Property Offices are experiencing issues, but some have arranged extensions of deadlines. Some offices have closed. Problems are occurring in the courts where some hearings are being cancelled.

The following presentation highlights nine common mistakes made during trade mark applications, and illustrates each one with specific examples from the insurance sector.

The UKIPO announced changes to its services on 27 March 2020 as a result of the business /postal disruption during the coronavirus pandemic.

The UKIPO issued details of changes to their services on 27 March 2020 as a result of the disruption to applicants’ businesses and the ability to receive and send post during the current coronavirus pandemic.

For 12 years, Page White and Farrer has worked closely with System1, a UK-based marketing and brand consultant, supporting them in all their trade mark registrations and protecting their intellectual property across the globe.

From 29 – 30 January 2020, Olaf Ungerer will be attending and speaking at the Intellectual Property Congress in Dubai hosted by the International Intellectual Property Law Association (IIPLA).

Page White and Farrer have worked closely with Clinova, a UK-based global consumer healthcare company, to build up their IP portfolio and to develop their global IP strategy.

Tom Woodhouse has prepared this diagram to show how patentable inventions can arise at any stage in the machine learning development pipeline. For example, the 2018 guidelines from the European Patent Office recognize that patentable inventions can arise where there is novelty in the way a model is trained or in the preparation of a training set. This is the case even if the model and the application of the model are not themselves new. Patentable inventions can also arise from novel data cleansing, feature extraction or user interfaces, or from new combinations or applications of existing models (to name but a few).

On Tuesday 19 November, Page White and Farrer will be exhibiting at the University of Oxford careers fair ‘Jobs for Mathematicians’.

On 22 November, Olaf Ungerer and Tom Woodhouse will be in Berlin to deliver a workshop hosted jointly with the RAILS Society on IP protection for artificial intelligence and robotics.

From 6-8 November 2019, European patent attorney Olaf Ungerer will be attending and speaking at the annual World Intellectual Property Forum which takes place in Taipei, Taiwan.

European trade mark attorneys Taryn Byrne and Oliver Spies recently attended the autumn Pharmaceutical Trade Marks Group conference in Berlin, Germany.

On 23 October 2019, JP Ruuskanen will be representing Page White and Farrer at the Helsinki IP Summit in Finland and discussing Brexit and intellectual property rights.

On 19 September 2019, Kelda Style and David Williams will be representing Page White and Farrer at The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) Congress 2019 in London.

On 16 July, members of Page White and Farrer laced up their running shoes and took part in the Standard Chartered Great City Race in London.

On 26 June, attorneys James Cornish and Oliver Spies will be attending the ECTA Conference in Edinburgh.

Tom Woodhouse describes how he was supported as a graduate trainee and rapidly rose to become partner with Page White and Farrer.

Our client’s company was established in 2010 when the founding entrepreneur recognised that the main sources of news and content were being consumed via individual RSS feeds.

The Page White and Farrer patent team were recently called on by Kopin Corporation’s US attorneys to help them protect the Solos™ Smart Glasses in Europe. Featuring the same technology used by USA Cycling and the Olympic track cycling team, the Solos™ give cyclists the possibility to consult GPS information in the corner of smart cycling glasses, without having to break their ride. The patent team successfully helped Kopin Corporation to protect their intellectual property in Europe.

There is much debate about whether the law is keeping pace with advances in technology and artificial intelligence. Taking an example in the field of chatbots and natural language processing in which he is experienced Olaf Ungerer, a partner based in Munich, has produced a guide for AI developers seeking patent protection for their software in Germany.

This week at INTA 10,600 brand owners and intellectual property experts from 150 countries will be congregating in Seattle to discuss the latest developments in trade mark protection around the world. European trade mark attorney James Cornish has examined the trade mark cases of the EU Intellectual Property Office over the last year relating to the conference and cocktail services sector and identified 21 lessons.

The Hague System provides for acquiring, maintaining and managing registered design protection internationally. The UK will join the Hague System as an independent member on 13 June 2018. Virginia Driver and Ian Whitfield provide an overview of the Hague System for international registration of industrial designs.

Following the revised guidance which makes changes to all eight parts of the previous European Patent Office guidelines on 1 November 2017, Martyn Townsend, patent attorney at Page White and Farrer takes a closer look at the patentability of user interfaces.

Matthew Bannister explains why he chose to join Page White and Farrer as a graduate trainee and the interesting variety of work.

James Cornish, Chartered Trade Mark Attorney, reviews the EU IPO Appeal Board and General Court pharmaceutical case law, between January and August 2017 in advance of the Pharmaceutical Trade Mark Group “PTMG” Autumn conference, to provide concise guidance on recent legal principles to help win pharmaceutical cases.

If you have invested in a trade mark for your brand anywhere in Europe, then you will want to maximise its power and ensure that potential competitors do not infringe your valuable intellectual property to take advantage with their marketing initiatives. James Cornish, at Page White and Farrer, has created this handy flow chart for brand owners to explain how to oppose or defend a trade mark application in the EU.

It is no surprise that intellectual property rights holders often wish to monetise their rights by means of some form of licensing arrangement. International IP licensing was the subject of the paper presented by Virginia Driver to the Spring Meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association in San Diego entitled ‘Hands Across the Water – the Special Relationship in IP Licensing,’ co-authored with Alex Driver of Powell Gilbert.

For business owners and start-up companies it is important that you protect your brand identity by obtaining a trade mark. With a registered trade mark you are in a stronger position to protect your brand if another business tries to use a similar name. This was the case for the owner of Buenos Aires Café, who called on the trade mark attorneys at Page White and Farrer after a competing restaurant group sought to register a similar brand at the UK intellectual Property Office.

Since the UK Company Names Tribunal was set up in 2008, it has decided nearly 700 cases of disputes about opportunistic names registered at UK Companies House. In our latest white paper, James Cornish analyses the decisions in these cases to provide useful lessons for brand owners who are having trouble with company name squatters.

If you own a trade mark for your brand it is important that you preserve its value by looking out for any trade mark applications from potential competitors which might be similar to yours. This was the case for the owner of a leading computer games company, who instructed the help of the trade mark team at Page White and Farrer after the UK Intellectual Property Office received a trade mark application for a name used in the successful game.