Johannes Graf Ballestrem lectured on the Unitary Patent & Unified Patent Court at the Summer School on Intellectual Property of the University of Bonn. Download: European Patent and Unitary Patent 2017

The current drive against single-use plastics is just one part of the EU's Circular Economy package, which is aimed at "closing the loop" of product lifecycles. The re-manufacturing and refurbishing industries have an important part to play in the circular economy, but may find themselves caught by a CJEU decision...

Welcome to the latest edition of IP@OC, Osborne Clarke's international IP newsletter. In this edition, we look at the changes taking place in IP across the EU including: the strengthening of rights for news publishers and increased liability for commercial content-sharing platforms (such as YouTube) as part of the Digital...

Background On 14 February 2022, the EU Commission (Directorate-General GROW) opened an impact assessment consultation and a public consultation on a new framework for standard-essential patents (more on the initiative here . Standard-essential patents (SEPs) are patents that protect technologies that are indispensable for some industries and have therefore become...

After much planning and discussion, the Unitary Patent (UP) and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) are due to launch in Europe in mid-2023. For the first time, the new UP will introduce a single patent right covering all EU Member States that have ratified the UPC Agreement and the UPC...

DoorDash is a US technology company that connects people with the best of their neighbourhoods across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany. By building last-mile logistics infrastructure for local commerce, its mission is to grow and empower local economies. Flink was founded in 2020 in Germany to bring consumers...

On 16 February 2017, the European Parliament debated the report and recommendation put forward by the Legal Affairs Committee on the legal, ethical and social issues raised by the steady incursion of robots into increasing areas of human activity (see our previous article here ). Disappointingly for those hoping for...

In January 2017, the European Commission held a workshop on patent licensing under the 5G telecommunications standard (now in development) and has prepared an outline proposal attempting to balance the interests of technology developers with those of makers of consumer products. What’s the issue? Companies that declare the patents they...