Tuesday Thingies

November certainly is passing quickly! This week, we bring upcoming events, job opportunities, and news from the CNIPA and Singapore. Are you ready for this week’s Tuesday Thingies?

Organised by Queen Mary University of London in association with Insight Studio Legale, this event will cover intellectual property law; content regulation, classification and consumer protection; contracts and privacy; and esports: regulation, contract and global approaches, all in the context of games. The event will take place on 22 November 2019 from 1pm to 6:45pm, at Bocconi University (Room 35, Floor 3) Via Sarfatti 25, Milan. To sign up and find further programme details, see here.

The RSC Law Group will be holding its eleventh annual and highly popular IP case law seminar on Monday 25 November 2019 from 1pm to 6pm, at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BA. Their event will involve discussions of recent high profile developments in the world of intellectual property law, with a chemical flavour.  Speakers will touch upon a variety of developments in the UK and across Europe, including the doctrine of equivalents following Actavis v Lilly, plausibility and requirements for data in patent applications and recent developments in relation to injunctions, as well as providing an update on case law from the EPO. Please contact Oliver Rutt at [email protected] with any queries or for registration requests. Further information can be found here.

The IPL Reading Group is pleased to announce its upcoming third session on ‘Registered and Unregistered Intellectual Property Rights’. The event will be held on Wednesday 27 November 2019 from 5-6pm, at the Small Committee Room (K0.31) in the King’s Building, King’s College London, W2R 2LS. Light refreshments will be served. More information and the reading list can be found on Eventbrite, KCL Events and the new Facebook page.

In its annual Innovation Lecture, UCL’s Institute of Brand and Innovation Law has brought together a distinguished panel (chaired by The Hon. Mr Justice Birss) to identify the problems of the current patent-based system and to investigate whether open innovation is the potential solution. The event will be held on Wednesday 27 November 2019 from 6pm to 8:30pm, at University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Further details can be found here.

The British Group of UNION is delighted to announce that the guest speaker at their annual Christmas dinner meeting on Wednesday 4th December 2019 will be Lord Kitchin! This will take place in the Royal Overseas League’s Princess Alexandra Hall, Overseas House, Park Place, St James Street, London, SW1A 1LR. The event flyer with further details, including how to book your place, can be found here.

The University of Helsinki Faculty of Social Sciences invites applications for the position of Tenure Track or Full Professor in Social and legal implications of Artificial Intelligence. Applicants should have a suitable background in the social sciences or law and their research should be focused on digitalization and social uses of artificial intelligence. They should also have substantive expertise in at least one of the following areas: algorithmic governance and its political and institutional consequences; citizenship rights in a digital world; social legitimacy and legal regulation of uses of data and AI; or cyber- and hate crime and media criminology. Moreover, theoretical expertise required to bridge social sciences and law (especially science and technology studies) and broad methodological competence (especially computational methods) will be regarded as valuable merits. For more information, see here.

At their annual meeting in Suzhou on 12 November 2019, the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), António Campinos, and the Commissioner of the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), Shen Changyu, agreed to enhance their bilateral co-operation in the framework of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). The aim is to give patent applicants filing an international patent application in English at the CNIPA as Receiving Office the choice to opt for the EPO as their International Searching Authority (ISA). It is expected that this new option will be offered in the course of next year, and be implemented as a two-year pilot.

For Chinese applicants, this step will offer an additional option to optimise their international patent strategy, especially when considering protection in Europe. As a result, Chinese users interested in accelerating the prosecution of their applications will, by selecting the EPO as their ISA, gain up to one year by entering into the European phase earlier and getting direct examination of their files, without the need for a European supplementary search.

In response to challenges faced as new technologies play a larger role in other areas of innovation, CNIPA and the EPO worked together to produce a joint study outlining the similarities and differences of examination practices specific to software-related inventions. The heads of the EPO and CNIPA launched a joint report at a public IP event in Nanjing on Monday. The findings are expected to provide practical guidance to applicants about what to expect when filing CII applications at the two offices. The joint report can be found here.

IPOS International has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Industrial Property Cooperation Centre (IPCC), Japan today. This collaboration will allow enterprises to tap on the patent search and analysis expertise of both countries, thus enabling enterprises to better protect and commercialise their IP in support of their business growth and strategies. Since its inception in August 2019, IPOS International has been actively building its networks. It has formalised agreements with other countries, including most recently with China and Russia. The media release can be found here.