LexBlog Australia › Patentology

• LexBlog Australia

In a significant judgment, the High Court of Australia has changed an aspect of patent law in Australia, ruling by a 4-3 majority that the first sale of a patented product exhausts the patentee’s exclusive rights in that product: Calidad Pty Ltd v Seiko Epson Corporation [2020] HCA 41.  For over a century, an alternative...

• LexBlog Australia

In a recent decision, a Hearing Officer within the Australian Patent Office rejected Australian patent application no. 2018219972, in the name of casino operator Crown Melbourne Ltd, relating to a modified roulette table layout.  In particular, the claimed invention was designed to provide a ‘double zero’ roulette game having similar visual appearance and betting options...

• LexBlog Australia

Defying the trend of almost every prior month this year, Australian standard patent filings in September were up by 8.1% on the same period in 2019.  This is the largest positive change for any month in 2020, beating pre-COVID January during which standard applications bested the previous year by 7.7%.  The September surge was driven...

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This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article. COVID-19 has had many devastating impacts all around the world, both in terms of fatalities and other health impacts, and also in economic terms.  While the economic impact is yet to...

• LexBlog Australia

The title of this article is intentionally ambiguous.  Does it mean that prospective clients should beware of unregistered practitioners?  Or does it mean that unregistered practitioners should beware of getting caught out?  Ideally, it would mean both.  In practice, as things currently stand in Australia, it mostly means neither.  Unregistered practitioners are not a problem...

• LexBlog Australia

In what might well be the final word on the scope and effect of so-called ‘Swiss type’ claims in Australia – at least for the foreseeable future – an enlarged panel of five judges of the Federal Court has clarified what is required for infringement of this form of claim: Mylan Health Pty Ltd v...

• LexBlog Australia

In a postscript to last month’s decision in Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Limited v Commissioner of Patents [2020] FCA 778 (see Federal Court Finds Computer-Implemented Gaming Machine Patent-Eligible in Australia), the court has now ruled that the Commissioner of Patents should pay only 50% of Aristocrat’s costs associated with its expert evidence.  Under the usual...

• LexBlog Australia

A question that I see asked from time-to-time is: ‘how many granted, enforceable patents actually exist?’ The answer obviously changes almost every day, as old patents cease or expire, and new patents are granted. That being said, as of 6 July 2020 there were, according to IP Australia’s records, 160,822 standard patents in force in...

• LexBlog Australia

On appeal from a decision of a delegate of the Commissioner of Patents, a single judge (Justice Burley) of the Federal Court of Australia has found that the claims of a number of innovation patents owned by Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Ltd, directed to electronic gaming machines (EGMs), are directed to patent-eligible subject matter: Aristocrat...

• LexBlog Australia

Following an appeal by the Commissioner of Patents, a Full Bench of the Federal Court of Australia has overturned a decision of a single judge of the Court relating to the patent-eligibility of a computer-implemented invention.  The Full Court has ruled that a claimed method and system, developed by Singapore-based Rokt Pte Ltd, for providing...

• LexBlog Australia

Last month, I wrote about IP Australia’s release of the Australian Intellectual Property Report 2020 (‘IP Report’).  I focused in particular on data included in the ‘Patents’ section of the report, and raised some questions about the methodology and the accuracy of some of the results presented.  I am pleased to say that IP Australia...

• LexBlog Australia

Last week, IP Australia released the Australian Intellectual Property Report 2020 (‘IP Report’).  As has become customary over the past few years, the launch of the IP Report was timed to coincide with World IP Day, which fell on Sunday 26 April 2020.  As my own analysis, published back in January, indicated, the number of...

• LexBlog Australia

IP Australia has announced that, as of 22 April 2020 up until at least 31 May 2020, most deadlines associated with Australian patent, trade marks, and design rights – including evidence deadlines in opposition matters – can be extended by up to three months, at no charge, if the extension is required ‘due to the...

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On 19 March 2020, Australia’s Shadow Minister for Employment, Industry, Science and Small Business, Brendan O’Connor, wrote to his counterpart, Industry Minister Karen Andrews, to ask if the government had ‘explored how Crown use of patents may be invoked, particularly for urgent manufacturing of supplies such as facial masks’.  While the country’s response to the...

• LexBlog Australia

On 26 February 2020, the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 2 and Other Measures) Bill 2019 received Royal Assent (i.e. was signed into law by the Governor General of Australia), becoming Act No. 9 of 2020. I reported passing of this Bill in the Senate, with amendments, in November last year, noting...

• LexBlog Australia

Just prior to Christmas, IP Australia announced that it is seeking feedback on its draft Cost Recovery Implementation Statement (CRIS), which outlines proposed fee changes that would take effect from October 2020.  It is also taking the opportunity to review the hearing costs that may be awarded for Patents, Trade Marks and Designs.  The public...

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In my previous blog post, I explained how preparing articles looking at patent applicants, patent recipients, and attorney firm performance over calendar year 2019 had got me thinking about where ‘new’ Australian patent applicants come from, in the literal sense of where they are located geographically?  I also noted that IP Australia’s annual IP Government Open...

• LexBlog Australia

In my previous article, I looked at the top applicants for Australian patents in 2019.  In this article, I turn the spotlight on the Australian patent attorney firms that were responsible for handling many of those filings.  Having identified a 1% decline overall in standard patent filings, a nearly 20% decline in innovation patent filings,...

• LexBlog Australia

Last calendar year, the number of standard patent filings in Australia fell by 1%, from 29,957 in 2018 to 29,666 in 2019.  While this represents only a small decline, it follows two years of growth, by 1.8% for 2016-2017 and 3.6% for 2017-2018, and thus represents a reversal of the recent upwards trend.  While international...

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I recently wrote about the decision of the Federal Court of Australia in Repipe Pty Ltd v Commissioner of Patents[2019] FCA 1956, in which two innovation patents owned by RePipe were found to be invalid, and thus liable to be revoked, on the ground that neither was for a patent-eligible ‘manner of manufacture’ under Australian...

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A dispute between the firm of Pizzeys Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – owned by listed entity IPH Limited (ASX:IPH) – and a firm established by two former Pizzeys principals, has gained public exposure through a decision of Justice Jagot in the Federal Court of Australia: Pizzeys Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys Pty Limited v...

• LexBlog Australia

In a decision issued on 22 November 2019 (Repipe Pty Ltd v Commissioner of Patents[2019] FCA 1956), Justice McKerracher in the Federal Court of Australia has found two innovation patents owned by RePipe Pty Ltd to be invalid, and thus liable to be revoked, on the ground that neither was for a patent-eligible ‘manner of...

• LexBlog Australia

On 16 October 2019 the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 2 and Other Measures) Bill 2019 was passed by the Australian Senate. Among other purposes, this bill includes long-anticipated provisions to phase out Australia’s second-tier patent right, the innovation patent – despite concerted last-ditch efforts by opponents of the move to persuade...

• LexBlog Australia

On Friday the 13th of September 2019, an expanded five judge panel of the Full Bench of the Federal Court of Australia handed down its much-anticipated judgment in the appeal by Encompass Corporation Pty Ltd against the finding of a single judge that its computer-implemented method for displaying information gathered from multiple sources was ineligible...

• LexBlog Australia

The Australian patent law and regulations provide applicants with a 12-month ‘grace period’, enabling an application to be validly filed following an inadvertent, or intentional, act of self-disclosure of an invention.  As most readers will doubtless be aware, this is significant because in the absence of such provisions, any disclosure – such as publication or...

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According to IP Australia records, somewhere in this unprepossessing block of apartments in suburban Canberra is the Australian ‘office’ of not one, but at least 47 Chinese companies, which collectively filed 164 standard patent applications between the beginning of January and the end of April, 2019 (link to Google Sheet with full listing).  In each...

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World Intellectual Property Day is celebrated each year on the 26th of April.  This year, the theme is ‘Reach for Gold: IP and Sports’.  To read more about World IP Day 2019, and to explore how ‘innovation, creativity and the IP rights that encourage and protect them support the development of sport and its enjoyment...

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Since January 2018, on an approximately monthly basis, I have been taking snapshots of the official Register of attorneys maintained by the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board (TTIPAB).  I therefore now have 15 months of data on the employment of registered patent attorneys in Australia and New Zealand.  And what this data reveals is that, even...

• LexBlog Australia

For a long time now the number of patent applications filed in Australia has been increasing.  For example, between 2009 and 2018 the total number of standard patent applications rose by over 25%, to nearly 30,000.  This growth has been driven by foreign applicants, with the number of applications filed by domestic applicants being, at...

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Since commencement of the Raising the Bar patent reforms in 2013 there has been a potentially fatal trap in the Australian rules relating to divisional applications.  I have always thought it inevitable that someone would eventually fall into this trap – and practically certain that when it did happen, the applicant would be from the...