Insights

“In this line of work, it’s vital that we do not conflate our personal perception with that of the ‘average consumer’ — a legal concept that serves as a reference point for assessing trademark disputes”. Dehns UK Chartered Trade Mark Attorney, Alexandra Nott, discusses the recent EUIPO Board of Appeal decision which held that Lewis Hamilton is not a well-known sports personality in the EU.

A patent must contain all of the information that is necessary for the skilled person to carry out the invention. If essential information is lacking, then the patent is insufficient and therefore invalid. It is not possible to cure insufficiency by adding further information to the patent (application) after filing, so it is important to give this requirement due consideration before a patent application is filed.

Many large language models have been trained using freely available web content, whether that be from crawling the internet, or using more specialised sources of content such as databases of patents or scientific articles.  Until recently it has been relatively ensured that most of this content is essentially human-generated.

At Dehns, we have been eagerly awaiting the outcome of the application for a stay of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) revocation proceedings between Astellas and Healios.  The Court may stay proceedings pursuant to Article 33(10) UCPA and Rule 295(a) RoP in the case that there are opposition proceedings before the EPO where “a decision in such proceedings may be expected to be given rapidly”.

Dehns Engineering Associate, John Somerton, discusses the recent High Court ruling, which finds that the training and use of an artificial neural network to suggest related media files to a user (e.g. to recommend songs) is a potentially patentable invention. The ruling has lead to the UKIPO abruptly suspending its guidelines on patenting AI inventions.

The news that X Corp. (formerly Twitter) is being sued over its use of “X” will be unsurprising to many. Indeed, such a possibility was predicted by numerous IP experts and media outlets.  My previous article (linked at the end of this article [1]) discussed Twitter’s change to X, as well as some earlier rights that could be potential conflicts for X Corp.  Whilst some of those earlier rights may still be a problem for X Corp., there is one company in particular that holds a trade mark including the letter X, which will certainly have the attention of X Corp.’s legal team.

In this webinar, Clare Mann takes listeners on a whistle-stop tour of the world of trade marks. In the first half, Clare covers the fundamentals of what a trade mark is and why they are important, and in the second half she looks at the steps that should be considered when a business is looking to expand its trade mark protection to other countries.

A good brand name immediately distinguishes a business from its competitors and, over time, can become an extremely valuable asset in its own right. It is vital that businesses protect their brands and this is primarily done by means of trade mark registration.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are technologies that are being exploited in many different industries. Patents are often sought for new inventions using these technologies, however different jurisdictions assess the patentability of such inventions in different ways that may lead to some stumbling blocks.

Dehns’ UPC representative Laura Ramsay is already finding there are controversial procedural issues arising in the cases that she’s handling at the new Unified Patent Court (UPC). Here, she reports on how the question of public access to documents has been interpreted in contrasting ways by different divisions of the UPC.