EPO staff, including examiners, have recently taken strike action, and protest demonstrations have been held in Munich and the Hague.

Various countries have regimes that provide tax incentives to encourage companies to carry out research and development work.

Exact details of those arrangements are of course a long way off.

On 14 November 2018, the UK government and the European Commission agreed in principle the terms of an Agreement between the UK and the EU setting out the terms of an orderly withdrawal of the UK from the European Union.

The UK government has not yet invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (this is likely to happen by the end of March), and the UK's actual exit from the European Union is at least two years away.

When the amended European Patent Convention (EPC2000) came into effect in 2007, various of the EPO's Rules were amended in the name of simplification.

In recent years there has been much progress in European initiatives to establish a Unitary European Patent and a Unified Patent Court.

Supplementary Protection Certificates provide a means of obtaining additional protection for pharmaceutical and plant protection products following patent expiry.

Further to our briefing document in March, the changes to the European Union Trade Mark system have now come into force.

The European Patent Office has a reputation for being very strict when assessing whether an amendment has basis in the application as filed

The official position of the UK government in the lead-up to the vote was that the official policy was to remain in the EU, and therefore there would be no planning, at least in public, for the event of the outcome being a vote to leave.

Additional post-filing data is often crucial to confirm the technical effect of pharmaceutical patents. On 1 February 2017 the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office will be deciding the fate of Bristol-Myers Squibb's (BMS) patent directed to dasatinib.

At first glance, perhaps not – patents afford a 20 year monopoly, but the regulatory approval processes surrounding new build are lengthy and necessitate early disclosure.

In March 2016 we reported on the various changes to the European Union Trade Mark Regulation, many of which came into force on 23 March 2016.

Some recent CJEU cases had cast doubt on the general question of whether one basic patent could form the basis for more than one SPC.

On 26 April 2018, the United Kingdom ratified the Unified Patent Court Agreement.

European Union and UK Registered Designs provide protection for the appearance of a product, including its shape ...

The European Patent Office (EPO) is not an EU institution and so a UK vote to leave the EU would not have any effect on the UK's membership of the European Patent Organisation.

An IP audit is a comprehensive review, carried out by an IP professional, of a business's existing IP assets, including patents, trade secrets, trade marks, designs and copyright.

The UK High Court recently revoked Janssen's Patent covering the use of amyloid-β antibodies in Alzheimer's disease for lack of sufficiency.