29th Jan 2016
The modern touchscreen smartphone has well and truly shifted away from being a phone, and is a multimedia device and a social networking and internet portal. As a result, such devices need a larger visual display and, with it, a larger battery to power them. However, as there seem to be few ground-breaking advances in […]
28th Jan 2016
Patrick Lloyd and Robert Sackin are attending the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Mid-Winter Institute in California this week. If you would like to meet with Patrick and Robert during the four day event, please contact marketing@reddie.co.uk. They will be using this as an opportunity to meet with our longstanding contacts and potentially introducing our […]
25th Jan 2016
Trade marks, the signs showing who made a product, are not just the words or images applied to the product, labels or packaging. If the sign is distinctive and capable of being shown on an application form, you can register it in the UK or as an EU mark. Sometimes the distinctiveness is argued as […]
25th Jan 2016
The European Patent Office (EPO) grant procedure typically takes about three to five years from the date an application is filed, although it can take longer than this. In some circumstances, it may be advantageous to expedite the grant procedure. For example, if an applicant becomes aware of a potential infringer, they may wish to […]
22nd Jan 2016
The discovery of an accurate, programmable and potentially valuable gene editing system known as the CRISPR-Cas system was announced to the public in the journal Science in 2012 by a group led by Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at Umeå University in Sweden. Corresponding patent applications relating to […]
20th Jan 2016
In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to register compound marks which combine basic figurative features with a descriptive word element. In turn, it has become very hard to overturn objections based on grounds that the figurative elements of a compound mark are too simple or minimal to render the mark distinctive. The question […]
11th Jan 2016
As our colleague Catherine Nursaw predicted only a few weeks ago, 2016 is indeed going to be a year for changes in trade mark law in the EU – the European Commission gave formal notice of the changes to the Community Trade Mark Regulation on 24th December 2015. The changes will start to come into […]
4th Jan 2016
In its recent D’Arcy v Myriad Genetics Inc (Myriad) decision, the Australian High Court ruled that claims directed to isolated BRCA nucleic acids were patent ineligible. Since then there has been much speculation on how this decision would be interpreted by the Australian Patent Office. In particular, many in the industry were concerned that the […]