Insights

During innovation, inventors, designers and artists will generate a number of ideas, some of which may become the subject of intellectual property rights. Proof of ownership of those ideas and their existence at a certain date and time, regardless of whether they eventually become formal intellectual property rights, can be useful for resolving disputes and...

On 3 April 2020, the Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office issued a decision for Appeal T1749/14 against refusal of European patent application 09810380.7 entitled “Mobile Personal Point-of-Sale Terminal”. The full decision can be read here. The Board of Appeal’s decision is in line with the principles established in the Cardinal Commerce...

One of the changes to the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) which came into force on 1 January 2020 was a revision of Article 11. This Article governs the remittal of cases from the Boards to the department of first instance. Under the previous version of Article 11, remittal would often...

While the requirement for novelty and inventive step is applied to all patent applications examined by the European Patent Office (EPO), some applications can find themselves subjected to closer scrutiny for further patentability requirements.  One of these, found most often in computer-implemented inventions, is the assessment of technical character.  If a feature of a claimed...

The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO has confirmed in decision G3/19 that plants, plant material or animals exclusively obtained by essentially biological processes are not patentable. This decision represents a change from earlier EBA decisions G2/12 and G2/13 (“Tomatoes II” and “Broccoli II”). In this regard, it has been confirmed that the...