I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the Parliamentary Counsel Office when the drafting of s 14 of the Patents Act 2013 was discussed. As you may recall, s 14 provides that an invention is a patentable invention if, amongst other things, it is a manner of manufacture within the meaning of s 6 of the Statute of Monopolies 1623. Yep, 1623. From the time of King James I. And this is...
I am a little anxious about this post. Am I about to stick a knife into a sacred cow? Will it attack me? So I’ll dive straight in: I don’t think patent examination hearings really work in many instances. The structure and the system don’t match the skill-sets of the people involved. Let’s think about what happens when you file a patent application. The patent...
Two topics I have been thinking, speaking and writing a lot about this year are patent support and patent sufficiency. There are a number of reasons I have focused on these: First, they are difficult issues to get a handle on, and I wanted to really, properly get to grips with them. (Honestly, I think very few people do really understand these issues, and perhaps that is a reflection of the...
I just went to a talk on tax, and it was uplifting. I mean, it was still a seminar, but in terms of fun factor I would rate it somewhere between listening to Mike Hosking (pretty bad) and Australian Lego Masters (oddly quite fun to watch with the kids). The speaker was Dr Tim Benbow, who is a partner at EY and is part of its R&D tax incentive team. And he did actually open his...
The discussion paper on the IP Amendment Bill was issued recently and submissions are being received at the moment (details here).
I’m going to do a series of posts highlighting the key issues in each of the sections of the discussion paper, starting with patents.
