With talk of the House of Lords heading to Yorkshire, Page White and Farrer is one step ahead! The leading firm of patent and trade mark attorneys has taken new office space in Platform, the trendy hub for tech and innovation in Leeds city centre.

Following the UK general election and conclusion of the EU Withdrawal Agreement, there is now a new stage in the departure of the UK from the European Union.

A Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) is a form of intellectual property that extends the protection of patented active ingredients present in pharmaceutical or plant protection products. SPCs serve to compensate patent holders for the effective loss in patent term that occurs due to delays in receiving marketing authorisation.

The European Patent Office (EPO) Board of Appeal has given its decision in case T844/18 regarding the CRISPR gene editing patent owned by the Broad Institute, MIT and Harvard College, declaring the patent invalid over prior art that was only citeable because some of the patent’s priority claims were not valid.

The German government is planning to introduce an exception to the automatic injunction (paragraph 139 of the German Patent Law).

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).

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year from everyone at Page White and Farrer.

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.

Whilst it is understandable to be enthusiastic about a proposed new brand, or product-line, don’t make the mistake of oversharing your ideas.

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.

In a new decision X ZB 9/18 (“Abstandsberechnungsverfahren”) of 7 May 2019 the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof or BGH) has clarified the responsibilities of each of the German patent authorities for receiving and examining divisional applications at different procedural stages.

Oliver Spies was interviewed on IP protection by Carsten Bolk of theUntold for the Stories4Brands online magazine, first published on 13 August 2019.

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.

Page White and Farrer has been acknowledged as one of the leading patent law firms in Europe by the Financial Times in its 2019 survey report.

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

Dr Clare Stephens and Jeff Daniels, expert life science patent attorneys at Page White and Farrer, will be attending this year’s BIO International Convention in Philadelphia between 3 and 6 June.

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.

If you have invested in a trade mark for your brand, then you will want to maximise its power and ensure that potential competitors do not creep too close and infringe your valuable intellectual property with their marketing initiatives. James Cornish has created this handy flow chart for brand owners to explain the process of opposing or defending a trade mark application in the UK.