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In his recent article, Robin Ellis summarised the key take-home messages from the UK Supreme Court judgement in Regeneron v Kymab.In this article Andrew Carridge takes a more in-depth look into the concept of a ‘principle capable of general application’, exploring when broad claims may be justified and when claims may legitimately cover as yet undiscovered embodiments.
The UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) gave a timely seminar on Artificial Intelligence on 9th January 2020. The speakers for this seminar were the head and senior examiner of the data processing group at the UK IPO.There were no real surprises that for AI inventions to be patentable they must fit around the exclusions (set out in Section 1(2) of the UK Patents Act) as interpreted by the guidelines (see below). However, the UK Examiner’s did indicate how the nature and/or presentation of the AI invention could lead to very different results, stressing that for borderline cases they are keen to engage with applicants and listen to technical arguments for patentability.The seminar follows a report released by the UK IPO into inventions relating to Artificial Intelligence released last year. See here for our earlier report.
The recent decision from the Court of Appeal of England & Wales in Teva vs Gilead has given us a first glimpse at how a national appellant court interprets the CJEU’s latest guidance on the meaning of Article 3(a) – what is a “product is protected by a basic patent in force”? Unfortunately, I found the judgement rather disappointing. Whilst we can now say with reasonable confidence that a claim covering the optional combination of a known, specified, active ingredient with a non-specified active ingredient would not be considered to protect a combination product within the meaning of Article 3(a) [hopefully this will become clearer later!], the decision is so limited that I struggle to see how it will significantly help patent drafters, prosecutors and litigators in the future. This is all a bit of an anti-climax after the flurry of decisions and opinions from the CJEU on referrals relating to Article 3(a) including this Truvada case (C-121/17), as well as the cases relating to Prezista (C-114/18) and Januvia (C-650/17).
A recent Court of Appeal judgment clarifies the UK approach to the patentability of numeric ranges.