The UK Intellectual Property Office recently had to decide whether the invention in a patent application claiming the production of quantum bits (or qubits) was sufficiently disclosed. The Hearing Officer confirmed the decision of the Examiner that the description was deficient and the invention was therefore not capable of industrial...
Start Date for the Unitary Patent Court
According to a number of informed sources, it is likely that the new Unified Patent Court Agreement will be ratified by Germany in the next month and the Court will start operating on 1 April 2023. This is not confirmed and we shall keep you up to date. The preparations...
Classifying Spam – not patentable in Europe
The challenges in obtaining European patent protection for inventions in the field of artificial intelligence have been highlighted in a recent decision by the European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal in dealing with a European patent application Nr. 14725807.3 by Google for “classifying resources using a deep network”. The patent...
Disclosing an Invention
The German Federal Court of Justice recently provided guidance on the level of disclosure of the invention required for a patent to be valid. The case (number X ZR 16/20 from 29 March 2022 - headlined "Übertragungsleistungssteuerungsverfahren") concerned a mobile communications system for communication between a base station and a...
Neural Networks are not Inventive
A recent German Patent Court decision No. 19 W (pat) 7/22 from 1 June 2022 reflected the practice of the European Patent Office in assessing the inventive step of an invention employing machine learning or artificial intelligence. The German Court decided that the mere inclusion of a reference to a...
Industrial Technologies 2022 Grenoble
This week three of our colleagues (Robert Harrison, Kilian Müller, and Eva Magd) took part in the EU-organised conference on Industrial Technologies 2022, held in Grenoble (France). The event is designed for research and technology organizations (RTOs), representatives of industrial companies as well as policymakers to discuss current trends, challenges...
Preparing Patent Specifications for Quantum Technologies
The requirements for a patent specification or description for an invention in the field of quantum technology are the same as for other patents. It is necessary to show that the claims of the granted patent define the subject matter for which patent protection is sought and the granted claims...
When is an invention “novel”?
One of the key requirements to get a patent application is that the invention needs to be "new" or "novel". That may sound a simple definition - the European Patent Convention states an invention is "considered to be new if it does not form part of the state of the...
Unified Patent Court – Administrative Committee established
The next step in setting up the new European Unified Patent Court has been established on 22 February with the inaugural meeting of the Court's Administrative Committee, according to an announcement on the court's website. The meeting adopted a number of items of secondary legislation, including the rules on the...
Quantum Computing Innovations
Regular analyses of patent applications world wide show that quantum computing is one of the fastest growing technologies and governments are investing large sums of money. One prediction, dating from 2020, suggests that the quantum computing market could read USD 1 trillion by 2035. With such large sums being poured...