The exercise is obviously perilous because about 230 years separate us from the French Revolution. However, it is very likely that if they were to look at copyright today, De Boufflers, Le Chapelier, Lakanal and the philosophers of the Enlightenment who theorized on the subject in the 18th century would be saddened by the fate...
Stanislas de Boufflers, December 1790 The patent as we know it today is the product of a sinuous history. Although isolated examples of the granting of exclusive rights to inventors can be found as early as antiquity, the emergence of legal protection for inventions is more recent. In France, the first exclusive royal privilege...
I won’t go back to the numerous litigations involving OPPO and Nokia around the world, nor will I comment on the decisions rendered by the German courts since this summer. What interests me is the unprecedented attitude of OPPO in these proceedings – which withdrew its products from the German market even before the execution...
The Birth of the UPC – Sir Robin Jacob
5 February 2022
The period of gestation for a human being is 9 months. That for an elephant 2 years. For the UPC how long? Not so easy to say. The first big formal effort of creating was the Community Patent Convention of 1975 – a woeful system (rejected by industry twice, at the time and later in...
Last year, we reported the failure of the introduction of the repair clause in French design and copyright law by two successive laws, both of which were judged unconstitutional on this point because they were too “cavalier”, but we feared a new and more fruitful attempt to introduce it [1]. This has been done since...
AI as inventor: when Man remains hidden in the mythology of technology – Matthieu Dhenne
15 November 2021
Two recent decisions in South Africa and Australia have accepted the fanciful thesis that an AI could be an inventor. I do not intend to comment on these decisions here, I simply want to try to understand how such a far-fetched (and useless) idea could gain so much ground in such a short time. Let’s...
The Gömböc case, or the setbacks of three-dimensional trademark protection – Clara Grudler
29 June 2020
On 23 April 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down a particularly enlightening decision on the notions of “shape of the product necessary to obtain the technical result” and “shape which gives substantial value to the product” (1). These are grounds for refusal or invalidity of a three-dimensional trade mark,...
T 161/18: Sufficiency of Disclosure Put to the Test of Artificial Intelligence – Matthieu Dhenne
28 June 2020
In a decision T 161/18 of 12 May 2020, the EPO Technical Board of Appeals 3.5.05 confirmed the rejection of an application for a neural network, considering the description insufficient in the absence of details of the data used, so that furthermore the neural network did not lead to any technical effect contributing to the...
Although the judgment handed down on 11 June 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union will not provide much information to the court in Liège, which had asked it to rule on the dispute between Brompton Bicycle Ltd and Chedech/Get2GEt, it will reassure the concerns that commentators may have had about the...
The question of damages for malicious prosecution is often raised by our clients, whether they are plaintiffs or defendants in an infringement action. If the infringement action is unsuccessful, if the title invoked is cancelled, does the plaintiff run the risk of being ordered to pay damages for abusive proceedings? For once, we used to...