Patents are increasingly being used to protect innovation in the food technology space. Food technology companies should carefully decide whether to use patents or trade secrets to protect their proprietary assets. ...more
Challenges to the validity of the “Patent Cooperation Treaty joint applicant” have been a problem for many applicants at the European Patent Office. On October 10, 2023, the EPO’s highest authority, the Enlarged Board of...more
Your patent is finally filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (or the office of your local country). Then you remember your attorney saying something about patents being jurisdictional, whatever that means…....more
Since the number of claim items of a patent application and the number of pages of the description and drawings directly affect the amount of work of the examiner, additional filing fees, i.e., excess claim fees and excess...more
I. Background Introduction - In recent years, the number of foreign patent applications entering China exhibits a steady growth on a yearly basis. Foreign applications are required to be translated to Chinese in order to...more
As we flagged last year in this note, the 2004 Protocols updating the Paris Convention and Brussels Convention have finally been ratified. This is likely the biggest increase in the international nuclear liability regime for...more
The largest shake up of the liability regime for nuclear incidents since the 1960s is finally expected to come into effect on 1 January 2022. Five years after the Nuclear Installations (Liability for Damage) Order 2016 (the...more
The new ex parte expungement and reexamination proceedings, introduced by the Trademark Modernization Act, are intended to be efficient ways of removing improper trademark registrations from the register. But will...more
In Washington: The Labor Department on Thursday adjusted last week’s jobless claims numbers upward, showing claims surged to a seasonally adjusted 861,000, a sign that the labor market continues to struggle to recover from...more
Earlier this year, and almost one year to the day (January 17, 2019) that the Opposition Division (OD) of the European Patent Office revoked in its entirety European Patent No. EP 2771468, the Technical Board of Appeal...more
Product design holds tremendous monetary value globally. This often leads to successful designs falling victim to knock-offs that can damage brand loyalty and reduce revenue. Design patents, which protect the ornamental...more
Imagine that you are a founder of a revolutionary technology startup in Canada. Your company is about to release its blockbuster product that will disrupt the entire industry and catapult your company to fame and...more
On 30 July, the Court of Appeal of The Hague ruled on the formal entitlement to priority following from a US provisional patent application. The attack on priority in this case is part of a recent trend by parties in patent...more
Businesses must balance the desire for intellectual property protection throughout the world with budget management goals. There is no “one size fits all” approach for achieving that balance, but there are certain...more
Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is facing aggravated fraud charges from German prosecutors for his leadership of the automaker “when it deceived regulators about its vehicles’ diesel exhaust levels.” The criminal...more
Dividing a single patent application into multiple patents is often essential for deriving maximum economic benefit from the disclosed inventions. When an applicant wants to protect multiple inventions disclosed in a single...more
Since 1995, the United States has allowed patent applicants to file provisional applications as an alternative to filing non-provisional utility patent applications (often referred to as “regular” or “conventional”...more
Beginning in 2009, the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office ("EPO") issued a series of decisions that essentially created a new priority law in Europe that allowed members of the same patent family to negate each...more
The Dickinson Wright team of Craig Phillips, Edward Perdue, and Steven Lustig successfully defended client, Lowtech Studios – creator of the highly popular mobile phone game app slither.io, from a trademark challenge by...more
A valid priority claim can allow a patent application to benefit from the filing date of an earlier patent application so as to exclude certain prior art from consideration. The recent decision of the U.S. Federal Circuit in...more
President-Elect Donald Trump announced this week three new cabinet nominees who will certainly influence U.S. energy policy at home and abroad. This alert is intended to update clients on the President-Elect's nominees and...more
On May 4, 2016, the Nuclear Installations (Liability for Damage) Order 2016 (the “2016 Order”) entered into force in the United Kingdom. The 2016 Order, which implements the 2004 Protocols1 to the Paris Convention and...more
Supreme Court Expands Discretion to Award Enhanced Damages for Patent Infringement and Eliminates the Federal Circuit’s ‘Seagate Test’ - In Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court...more
On June 29, 2016, the North American Climate, Energy, and Environment Partnership was announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Barack Obama, and President Enrique Peña Nieto at the North American Leaders Summit...more
Patent applicants who have filed a priority application (such as a U.S. Provisional application) may wish to abandon and then refile that priority application to extend the time available for filing a utility application. ...more