Over 1,000 Australian innovation patent applications were filed in July – an all-time record, ahead of 768 applications in June and 692 in May.  Between 2010 and early 2020, there were typically between 100 and 200 innovation patent applications filed each month.  But with the system set to close to new applications from 26 August 2021, filings have surged over the past year, with over 600 applications every month since October 2020 (with the…

As I recently (tentatively) predicted, on Friday 30 July 2021 Justice Beach in the Federal Court of Australia handed down a judgment giving Australia the dubious honour of becoming the first country in the world to legally recognise a non-human as a valid inventor on a patent application: Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879.  I would suggest that the remarkable speed with which this unnecessarily lengthy (228 paragraphs) decision was rendered, after…

It is common to summarise patent filing numbers over calendar years – back in January I reported on various filing statistics for 2020, and IP Australia did likewise in April.  For most Australian businesses, however – including patent attorney firms – the more important reporting period is the financial year ending on the 30th of June.  It is therefore interesting to look at patent filing numbers over the 12 month period commencing at…

This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Mike has previously contributed articles on the impact, from an Australian perspective, of COVID-19 on international patent, trade mark, and registered designs filings, and on what patent data can tell us about the Australian government’s plan for local manufacturing?  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article. There is an increasing realisation that a successful economy…

One of the objectives of the Raising the Bar IP law reforms – most of which commenced on 15 April 2013 – was to reduce delays in the resolution of patent (and trade mark) applications.  The perceived problem with such delays was not that applicants were unhappy with the speed of processing of their applications (in fact, most choose to defer examination and acceptance of their patent applications), but rather that delays create uncertainty about…

In 18 June 2021, a Full bench of the Federal Court of Australia (Middleton, Nicholas, and Burley JJ) unanimously upheld a decision of a single judge of the court (Beach J), finding that a method of detecting cell-free foetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal blood serum comprises patent-eligible subject matter (i.e. a ‘manner of manufacture’) under Australian law: Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc v Sequenom, Inc [2021] FCAFC 101.  The patent at issue is Australian patent no. …