De Standaard 25 april 2018

...De lijst van innovatieve universiteiten werd opgesteld in samenwerking met Clarivate Analytics. Er werd voornamelijk rekening gehouden met patenten en wetenschappelijke verwijzingen...

The Broad Institute has been dealt a big blow in its battle for CRISPR/Cas9 intellectual property, with the European Patent Office revoking one of its patents.

CRISPR/Cas9 has been hailed as the ‘scientific discovery of the century’ due to its capacity to modify the genome for the treatment of genetic diseases. The Broad Institute, set up by MIT and Harvard in 2004 to use genomics to improve human health, successfully obtained a patent from the US Patent Office for its use in eukaryotes. However, the European Patent Office (EPO) has revoked the first of several patents obtained by the Broad Institute, citing a clear lack of novelty.

Bank of America has more blockchain-related patents than any other firm in the U.S., according to a new report by New York-based law firm EnvisionIP.

According to the report, Bank of America has 43 patents while Mastercard and IBM have 27 each, followed by 14 from Fidelity.

The report counted a total of 1,045 blockchain related patents. Of this number, about 60% of patents were filed by blockchain companies, while the financial services sector accounted for 20%.

Read more at Finextra and Payments Source.

The USPTO has finalized a new set of fees: Final Rules. 

The parties did not appeal after the judgment. Typical Significance This is a novel and typical case of trademark infringement and unfair competition dispute with system establishment, full imitation, and comprehensive infringement. This case involves many legal issues, and the infringement acts found have the following obvious characteristics:

1. The accused infringers establish franchise system through trademark assignment, registration, brand name registration, etc. to show the “legitimacy” of its use of the logo, trying to conceal the nature and purpose of the infringement acts.
2. The accused infringers confuse the public through comprehensive imitation of the right holder’s logos, not only including the infringement act on all the major trademarks of the right holder during the process of business operation, but also including the unfair competition act of trade name infringement and even other infringement acts.
3. The accused infringers completely imitated the right holder’s logos by division of labor and collaboration, assignment and registration of trademarks and trade names, as well as committed three-dimensional and full range of infringement acts by means of copying infringement through franchise system, etc. with huge impact and serious damage. Therefore, such malicious infringement acts should be severely punished.