Specification of a patent meaning

In this issue: Research and development Medical devices Disputes and regulatory enforcement Competition in life sciences Pharmaceuticals—regulatory framework Daily and weekly news alerts Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Research and development Council of EU approves EU AI Act The Council of the EU has signed off the EU AI Act. Once endorsed by the presidents of the Council and the European Parliament, the law will appear in the Official Journal of the EU and take effect 20 days later. Most rules will start to apply two years after entry into force, with certain provisions operating on a different timetable. See: LNB News 21/05/2024 9. DSIT publishes international scientific report on advanced AI safety The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has issued the interim International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), commissioned at the Bletchey Park AI Safety Summit in November 2023. Bringing together a...

In this issue: Trade marks/passing off Patents Geographical indications LexTalk®IP: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Trade marks/passing off Comparative advertising—High Court gives preliminary ruling on features compared (Gibraltar v Viovet) The High Court, in Gibraltar (UK) Ltd v Viovet Ltd [2024] EWHC 777 (Ch), delivered a preliminary view on which attributes were set against each other in comparative adverts for veterinary nutraceuticals. The ruling underscores that implied messaging can matter as much as explicit claims when deploying comparative advertising. Online customers selecting a trade marked product were presented with the retailer’s own-brand option and prompted to ‘Swap and Save’. The retailer said the comparison was limited to price, whereas the trade mark owners argued the ads implicitly indicated the own-brand products matched the branded items in nature, composition and specification. The court sided with the claimants, finding that the average...

ARCHIVED: This Practice Note is archived and not maintained. It was originally prepared for Lexis Practice Advisor®, in the US. What is a patent? Under the US Patent Act 1952 (Patents Act), patents are issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). A patent owner holds a time-limited right to stop others from practising the claimed invention within the United States. The most common form is the utility patent, typically claiming a tangible thing or a set of steps. Design patents protect the ornamental appearance of an article of manufacture. Plant patents safeguard a plant variety produced through grafting, budding, or comparable methods (rather than by seed). Importantly, eligible subject matter must be stated in the patent claim itself; a disclosure in the specification alone is not enough. See Two-Way Media Ltd v Comcast Cable Communs, LLC, 874 F.3d 1329, 1338-1339 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 1, 2017) (not reported by LexisNexis®)...

Grounds of patent revocation Patents can be revoked (ie taken off the patents register) where they are found invalid in some respect. A revoked patent is treated as though it never existed. The statutory bases for revocation are contained in section 72 of the Patents Act 1977 (PA 1977). These include that the invention is not patentable (eg it lacks novelty, inventiveness or industrial applicability) and that the specification fails to disclose the invention with sufficient clarity and completeness for a person skilled in the art to put it into effect. This deficiency is called ‘insufficiency’. This Practice Note focuses on patent invalidity arising from insufficiency. For details on other invalidity grounds, see the following Practice Notes: Patent invalidity—grounds of revocation Patent invalidity—obviousness Patent invalidity—lack of novelty Claim construction/scope To assess validity and/or infringement, the court must interpret the patent claims—ie ascertain their meaning and extent. For further guidance on claim construction, see Practice Note: Patent infringement—Claim construction/scope...

This Practice Note This Practice Note outlines the different methods by which a patent proprietor may alter its patent. There are numerous avenues to amend a patent at various points in its lifetime, and this depends on whether the application for the patent started at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO), the European Patent Office (EPO) or under the international Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) system, from the outset and onwards. Amendment without restriction is not permitted, as this would shift the goalposts for where the limits of the patent owner’s monopoly rights lie. This is unacceptable in a patent system granting exclusive, or so‑called ‘monopoly’, rights, because people consulting the register of those rights must be able to work out whether they might infringe the patent, without the scope of the patent changing over time. However, at the time of making a patent application it is not realistically possible to know definitively about every conceivable piece of prior art, for example...