EPO Enlarged Board of Appeal Rules on Plant-Patentability in Broccoli II and Tomatoes II Decision

 The European Patent Office (EPO) has again announced a set of fee increases[1] on procedural fees, to be effective from 1 April 2024.

Throughout history, we have witnessed periods of significant technological advancements that have revolutionised society. We are now in the age of information, biotechnology, and the renewable energy revolution. We are witnessing, and will continue to witness, massive leaps forward in technology bringing with them significant social and cultural changes. This is all happening at a speed never seen before.

Throughout 2023, Wynne-Jones IP supported local charity,Cheltenham Open Door. Over the course of the year our active Chairty & Social Team organised fundraising events and donation rallies to enable the small, independent charity to provide much needed support in the community.

We are delighted to announce a strategic partnership with CyNam to support and sponsor their mission to nurture cyber technology innovation in Gloucestershire.

ChatGPT is, undoubtedly, a remarkable tool that is revolutionising the way people work. But, like a lot of technology it has its pitfalls - we’ve all seen the headlines about bias, misinformation and students using it to generate work. We asked it what the top five questions people were asking about intellectual property in the UK, to provide the answers and then asked our expert IP attorneys what they thought.

The UK Government has recently announced a 10-year strategy and £1billion investment plan in the semiconductor industry. Reaction has been mixed: some have said that it’s a “starting gun on a bright future” while others say that it’s simply not enough. We talked to semiconductor experts Dr Ian Lambert and Dr Elliott Davies of Wynne-Jones IP to find out what semiconductors are and to get their thoughts on the announcement.

Arguably, one of the most horrifying times for an IP owner is when protection dies (or expires)...

In 2017 the U.K. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017], that fundamentally changed how U.K. patent infringement is assessed, by the (re-) introduction of a ‘doctrine of equivalents’, in which a feature that falls outside of a ‘normal’ interpretation of the claims but that nonetheless varies from the invention in a way that is ‘immaterial’,  infringes a U.K. patent. This can provide a U.K. patent with a broader scope of protection than was the case prior to the Actavis decision.

Here we look at how the Actavis decision has been applied and developed in subsequent decisions by the U.K. courts.