This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more

Law Notes Intellectual Property Law Notes

Patents Notes

Updated Patents Notes

Intellectual Property Law Notes

Intellectual Property Law

Approximately 1014 pages

IP law notes fully updated for recent exams at Oxford and Cambridge. These notes cover all the LLB Intellectual Property law cases and so are perfect for anyone doing an LLB in the UK or a great supplement for those doing LLBs abroad, whether that be in Ireland, Hong Kong or Malaysia (University of London).

These were the best IP Law notes the director of Oxbridge Notes (an Oxford law graduate) could find after combing through dozens of LLB samples from outstanding law students with the highes...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Intellectual Property Law Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Patents

Intellectual Property LLM

Notes

Table of Contents

Introduction to Patents 3

What is a Patent? 3

History 3

Procedure 3

Prosecution of a Patent 4

Systemic Complexities 4

Why Have Any Patent System? 5

Entitlement 6

Inventor 6

Employer 6

Compensation For Employee Inventions 7

Novelty 8

Origins 8

Procedure 8

Prior Art (Step 2) 8

Made available in the prior art? (Step 3) 9

Difficult Issues 10

Inventive Step 12

Pozzoli 13

Stage 1 – Identify the person skilled in the art with common general knowledge 13

Stage 2 – Identify the Inventive Concept 13

Stage 3 – Identify the Differences Between the State of the Art and the Inventive Concept 13

Stage 4 – The Comparison 14

Industrial Application 16

Methods of Medical Treatment 16

Crackpot Inventions 16

Chemistry, Biotech and Genetics – Early Research Milestones 16

Sufficiency of Disclosure 18

The Claim/Specification Balance 18

Infringement 19

Types of Infringing Activity 19

Indirect Infringement 21

Additional Liability 22

Scope of Protection 22

Doctrine of Equivas 24

Defences 24

Private, Non-Commercial Uses (s60(5)(a)) 24

Experimental Uses (s60(5)(b)) 24

Prior Use (s64(1)) 25

Biotech Inventions 25

Reflections 25

Introduction to Patents

Patent law has a reputation for being difficult, because there is a lot of long and complex case law, and reading the cases is hard because there are hard scientific concepts at issue, but we’re not expected to understand the technologies, and we are only expected to know the main legal principles. Where the facts are difficult, a potted summary will be given.

“You can’t hold back the waves, but you can learn to surf”

It’s more interesting and important than other parts of IP. Packaging is boring, as are trade names, but the chemicals inside are interesting!

We want to focus on how the law is interpreted and applied, along with how the law seeks to balance competing interests between innovators, competitors and users of technology, and how well it achieves that. There is a lot of politics behind patent law, and it generates a lot of strong opinions, so this might give you an idea as to how the law is developing. There is an interesting relationship between the UK and the EPO and the CJEU. There is also an assumption that patents provide a sensible incentive for innovation, and this is an important point as well.

What is a Patent?

It is a legal mechanism by which exclusive rights/monopolies can be obtained (i.e. to make, work and sell specified products or processes). They are time-limited, exclusive rights to restrict the trade and use of ideas and information, incorporated in a qualifying product or process. In a patent document, there is bibliographic information, which is used primarily for administrative purposes, and then a specification, with a description and the claims of the owner – defining the scope of the protection. This is interpreted in light of the description. There will be lots of claims – broad ones to maximise the breadth of the patent, with narrow ones as fall-back options.

They are similar to other IP rights – time limited, exclusive rights, and it's a species of property. It is territorial, and only valid in the territory that grants it. They differ in key respects, though. They must be applied for, and registered, unlike copyright. This means that there are whole systems of patent attorneys and examiners to register them and grant them. There are also differences in requirement – they need to be inventions, and there are requirements of novelty and inventiveness, and they need to be of credible utility. You are not required to use them, but there is a renewal requirement, and they only last for 4 years. Unlike copyright, you don’t need to prove copying of the handiwork – any independent invention of the same idea is infringement.

History

Used to be granted by monarchs, and reformed by the Statute of Monopolies in 1623. In the ensuing centuries, there’s been a rocky ride to defining the principles surrounding patent law, which give it the legitimacy to give this right to people. Patents Law now governed by Patents Act 1977, which was designed to bring the UK into line with the European Patents Convention of 1973.

Procedure

The question whether to patent must be taken very early on, and is a big decision. Whether or not to patent is dependant on a company’s business model. It might decide to use trade secrets, or maybe it won’t patent or use trade secrets - open science attitude. However, this is not widespread, and there are prolific uses of the patent system.

Once you have decided to patent, how do you do it? This is done either through the UK patent office, or the EU patent office. The difference between them is in procedure. The UK office in Swansea can grant a UK national patent. The EPO in Munich can grant a bundle of national patents. It checks the application against the European Patent convention, and against the interpretation of that act by its own boards of appeal in order to come to a decision. The European Patent Office doesn’t have a system of precedent, but there is some ability to reference to larger boards of appeal. The systems aren’t that different (the UK courts, and the UK acts are intended to harmonise the interpretation of the rules, but interpretation now always the same, and not always possible to discern whether interpretation is the same.

EPO has a process of opposition – a Third Party can challenge the grounds of a patent up to 18 months after its being granted. However, in both systems you can apply to revoke a patent. There are differences in cost and speed, but the biggest difference is the multinational aspect of the EPO.

Both of that bodies are supposed to be self-sustaining QuANGOs

Prosecution of a Patent

The most important thing to note is the priority date. This is the date that the provisional application is filed. This is the date at which all of the criteria are judged. This is a tricky decision – you want to be as early as possible, but you can’t...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Intellectual Property Law Notes.

More Intellectual Property Law Samples