A single judge of the Federal Court of Australia, Justice O’Bryan, has granted Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Ltd (‘Aristocrat’) leave to appeal a decision issued back in March this year.  In that decision, Justice Burley found that all remaining claims in a group of innovation patents relating to computer-implemented electronic gaming machine (EGM) technology did not define patent-eligible subject matter.  The grant of leave opens up an opportunity for Aristocrat to ask the High Court of Australia to untangle the mess that it created back in 2022 when a six-judge panel split ..read more

Australia has a pre-grant patent opposition system.  That is to say, once an application has passed examination and been accepted for potential grant as a patent, there is a period (of three months) during which anybody may oppose the grant.  The subsequent opposition proceedings – if they run their full course – consist of a series of evidentiary stages, legal submissions, and an oral hearing, following which the hearing officer (a delegate of the Commissioner of Patents) issues a written decision on the outcome of the opposition.  In the final reckoning, the patent application ..read more

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As I recently reported, Australian patent filings in 2023 fell slightly, by 2.4%, over the previous year.  This implies, of course, that patent attorneys filing applications on behalf of domestic and foreign clients should, overall, also have experienced a similar decline new filings.  But, of course, individual firms fared differently in the competition for this work.  Looking at new complete (i.e. non-provisional) patent filings across Australia and New Zealand, declines were experienced by all firms held within the two groups owned by Australian Securities Exchange listed ent ..read more

Over the past five years (i.e. since 2019) Korea’s LG Electronics Inc and China’s Huawei Technologies Ltd have consistently placed in the top five applicants for Australian patents.  Indeed, for the past four years they were in the leading three.  In 2021, Huawei came out on top with LG a close second.  In 2022, LG took top place, with IBM appearing from nowhere to push Huawei back into third.  And in 2023, LG has once again grabbed the top spot, with Huawei not too far behind, and IBM easing up on its Australian filing frenzy to slip back into equal 14th position with a ..read more

In 2023 the total number of standard patent applications filed in Australia remained above 30,000 for the third year running, despite a 2.4% drop in filings.  This follows a decline of nearly 0.5% in the previous year.  However, whereas the decline in new applications in 2022 was due to fewer filings by Australian residents (with a slight increase in foreign-originating applications preventing a larger fall), the drop in 2023 was the result of nearly 800 fewer filings by foreign applicants.  As always, a majority of new filings were national phase entries (NPEs) derived from int ..read more

As some readers may be aware (I have previously mentioned it only in passing) a firm in the IPH Limited (ASX:IPH) group – the market cap of which is A$1.56B at publication – is once again taking legal action against a recently-established firm and its founders, all of whom are former employees of Spruson & Ferguson (‘S&F’).  Earlier, IPH group firm Pizzeys had sued RnB IP and its two founders – formerly partners in Pizzeys at the  time of its acquisition by IPH – for alleged breach of non-compete, non-dealing, and/or non-solicitation restraints that were included in their emp ..read more

Back in July, the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Disciplinary Tribunal (‘the Tribunal’) issued a decision in relation to a complaint about a registered attorney (‘the attorney’) by a client (‘the client’) in response to which the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board (TTIPAB, a.k.a. ‘the Board’) commenced disciplinary proceedings, bringing nine charges against the attorney.  The full decision of the Tribunal can be found here [PDF, 364kB], while a separate ruling on the penalties to be applied can be found here [PDF, 223kB].  This decision is a ‘first’ in a couple of respects.  It is the ..read more

IP Australia has published a draft of its four-yearly Cost Recovery Implementation Statement (CRIS), which outlines proposed fee changes that would take effect from October 2024.  It is also taking the opportunity to review the hearing costs that may be awarded for Patents, Trade Marks and Designs.  Feedback on the proposals may be provided via submissions to IP Australia’s public consultation page.  Consultation is open until Sunday, 21 January 2024.  In this article I will be looking in greater detail at some of the changes relating to patents in particular.  Stakeh ..read more

Governments around the world are considering how they can – and should – regulate the development and deployment of increasingly powerful and disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.  Australia is no exception.  On 1 June 2023, the Australian government announced the release of two papers intended to help ‘ensure the growth of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) in Australia is safe and responsible’.  The first of these is the Rapid Response Report: Generative AI, which was commissioned by Australia’s National Science and Technology Council at the request of t ..read more