This patent battle between Apple and Samsung is the lawsuit that just won’t go away.

Since 2011, the two smartphone giants have been fighting over five patents due to the claim that Samsung infringed on Apple’s intellectual property when it made a handful of devices including the original Galaxy S 4G, the Galaxy S2, and the Droid Charge.

In earlier hearings, the court had already determined Samsung did infringe on two of the utility patents in question, which was determined by the jury in the most recent trial to be worth a fine of $5.3 million.

However, the more contentious part of the lawsuit involves the three design patents (1, 2, 3) in question, which describe a device with a black front, rounded rectangular corners, similarly curved surrounding bezels, and a colorful grid of icons. 

Het Europees Octrooibureau heeft zijn statistieken voor 2017 gepubliceerd. Het aantal octrooiaanvragen is met 3,9 procent gestegen tot een nieuw record van 165.590. België verliest een plaatsje in de hitlijst en eindigt dertiende met 2155 aanvragen.

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.

Patents

China's State Intellectual Property Office received the highest number of patent applications in 2016, a record total of 1.3 million. It was followed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (605,571), the Japan Patent Office (318,381), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (208,830) and the European Patent Office (159,358). On a per-capita basis, patent filings in China ranked behind those in Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the U.S.

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.