The Australian Advisory Council on Intellectual Property (ACIP) has released an interim report outlining measures to assist inventors to enforce their rights and is seeking written submissions by 30 September 2009.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a timely reminder that trade mark and domain name owners should exercise caution before paying what appear to be renewal notices. There are a growing number of services issuing documents that look like invoices for listing registrations in registers that offer no benefit to owners. Recipients of such notices …
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Further to our last post on this issue, IP Australia has issued two further consultation papers inviting any interested parties to make a written submission by 16 October 2009. The first paper discusses proposals for improving the flexibility and time frames of the patent examination process. The second paper discusses proposals to remove unnecessary differences, to improve certainty and …
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IP Australia has announced that a designated Australia Post office in each state and the Northern Territory will become the lodgement centre for documents and payment of fees relating to registered IP rights and new applications. The rolling transition will commence in September 2009 with Tasmania and conclude by August 2010.
New IP Regulations will amend the Patents Regulations 1991 from 1 July to update the English text of the Regulations under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT Rules) to reflect the changes that were agreed to at the PCT Union meeting of September 2008.
In the recent decision Fermiscan v James [2009] NSWSC 546, a second invention for a method and instrument for analysing nail and skin samples using X-ray diffraction to screen for disease was found not to be an improvement on a first invention by the same inventor for substantially the same method and instrument, the difference being that …
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The Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, Dr Francis Gurry, will present a public lecture at the Melbourne Law School on 3 August. Gurry is the highest-ranking Australian official in a United Nations agency, and only the third to ever head a UN agency. He is making his first official visit to Australia since …
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IP Australia has released three consultation papers discussing proposals for improving patent opposition proceedings, trade mark opposition proceedingsand divisional application processes. The objective of the proposals is to reduce the period of uncertainty during which the public and third parties do not know where they have freedom to operate.
The granting of interlocutory injunctions continues apace with Ryan J in Wake Forest University Health Sciences v Smith & Nephew Pty Ltd [2009] FCA 630 ordering Smith & Nephew be restrained from commercial dealings in their Negative Pressure Wound Therapy Foam Dressing Kits said to be an infringement of Wake Forest’s patent.
As noted in the article “Rapid relief – seeking interlocutory injunctions to restrain patent infringement” in the May 2009 issue of Inventive Steps, there appears to be a recent trend for Australian Courts to more readily grant an interlocutory injunction to restrain alleged patent infringement. While the cases mentioned in that article mostly arose in …
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