Posts in International

In order to reach an agreement the United States granted a key concession relating to biologics, which are advanced medicines made from living organisms. Presently the United States provides 12 years of data exclusivity for these types of medicines, but the TPP agreement knocks that term down to 5 years. Sources have confirmed to me that a TPP deal that so substantially reduced biologic data exclusivity will face an uphill battle in Congress.

The Consultation is part of the Commission’s assessment of the role of online platforms, promised in its Communication on a Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe (DSM) dated 6 May 2015. The Consultation covers a range of topics, including several controversial issues concerning transparency of online platforms and the proper extent of the hosting defence under the E-Commerce Directive. Interested parties have until around the end of December 2015 to respond (the exact closing date has not yet been published).

For this story Steve Brachmann interviewed Tim Kopra, who will be Commander of Expedition 47 aboard the International Space Station… Noting that ISS astronauts were more like lab technicians than scientists, Kopra separated ISS experiments into three main categories. “For some experiments we are the subjects,” Kopra said, especially for those experiments leading to a better understanding of how spending an elongated amount of time in zero-gravity environments affects the human body. Other experiments only require some setup from astronauts after which they run fairly autonomously while still more experiments are installed on the exterior of the ISS and require no astronaut intervention at all.

The current state-of-the-art in nuclear power plant reactor design and construction is known as Generation III+. These reactors are essentially safer versions of the Generation III reactors that began operation in 1996 starting with the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa commercial plant in Japan. Generation III+ reactors must operate within very strict safety guidelines. The power plant’s structure must be durable enough to withstand a plane crash without releasing radiation. Power plants must operate for periods of 60 years. The grace period after reactor shutdown, during which time no human intervention is required, must be 72 hours. Further, the risk of core melt accidents must be low enough that a risk assessment analysis returns a calculated core damage frequency (CDF) of 1×10-4 per year.

Although not a prolific filer of U.S. patent applications, Gilead does currently holds 2,131 active patent grants according to data collected by Innography… Despite all of the recent focus on Gilead’s anti-viral medications, we noted a trio of patents issued to the company recently by the USPTO to address issues in patient cardiac health. U.S. Patent No. 9056108, issued under the title Method of Treating Atrial Fibrillation, claims a kit containing a first composition which includes dronedarone or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof, and then a second composition which includes ranolazine. This innovation was found to improve the anti-arrhythmic efficacy of dronedarone, which can be used to treat atrial fibrillation but is poorly tolerated by patients in higher doses.

With American farmers already heavily involved in the regulatory conversation involving the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, we thought that it would be interesting to delve into the world of farming robotics and see the recent advances in that particular field. It’s important to understand first that the robotics being developed for commercial use on farms won’t be stand-alone humanoid units ranging through fields to pick crops. Any piece of hardware implementing an algorithm which automates some of the manual work of farming falls under this heading.

We’ve all been there. The Marketing team comes up with a shortlist of branding ideas for the latest product or service – and at the top of the list is a brand which is descriptive. As trade mark lawyers, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we didn’t explain that the descriptive brand will be more difficult to register as a trade mark than a made-up, distinctive name (in the UK anyway). Plus, it’ll be harder to enforce. However, the appeal of a descriptive brand (simple and clear) can’t be denied, especially with internet searching and online sales now so important. In this post, we’ll take a look at a few obstacles to enforcing a descriptive brand in the UK and Europe, and how to overcome them.

Samsung’s smart television technologies, which utilize an IP address to provide additional content to complement typical broadcast television, will get a boost from the innovation described within U.S. Patent No. 9124931, entitled Managing a TV Application for Over-The-Top TV. It discloses a method of displaying content on a television by dynamically determining whether an input source for a TV is set to a virtual input source, validating viewer account credentials, executing a TV application that enables over-the-top (OTT) TV video content delivery using an Internet connection, dynamically displaying content from a last-selected channel or service, enabling normal TV operations including changing channels and automatically the TV application enabling OTT TV video content delivery for the last-selected service when the TV is turned on. This invention enables an Internet television owner to quickly return to the OTT service application, like Netflix or Hulu, which an owner was last watching without having to wait for the app to load.

Territoriality has been a difficult aspect of public international law to apply to the Internet and information technology sectors. It’s a central aspect of the current flap between Google and CNIL, which wants Google to remove listings purged under the right to be forgotten from its main Google.com domain, which Google sees as its American property. Another issue discussed at the conference include the need to finalize safe harbor privacy principles which would establish rules for U.S. or European Union businesses which store customer data, bridging the gap between differences in data privacy standards in the two jurisdictions.

Unlike Big Bear Lake, which will collect the runoff snowfall or rain, much of the rest of southern California is ill equipped to take advantage of El Niño rains. Those familiar with southern California will know that in beach towns there are signs on or near drains warning people not to dump things into the gutter because whatever goes into the drain will be released into the ocean. That, of course, also means that water that falls in beach communities in southern California will not be collected, or even useful. Due to perpetual poor government planning, even if El Niño does drop large amounts of rain water on southern California much of it will simply wind up in the ocean.

Most people are familiar with the four-finger KitKat bar which has been produced by Nestlé in the UK since 1935. In 2010 Nestlé decided to apply to register the four-finger shape of the KitKat bar as a trade mark. Cadbury, fearing Nestlé would be able to establish a monopoly on four-fingered chocolate products, raised an objection to the application. Nestlé were initially successful in their application but, following Cadbury’s legal challenge, the case escalated to the High Court and the CJEU where the shape was subjected to further scrutiny and ultimately rejected as a trademark.

While patents protect innovations that are novel, nonobvious and useful, data exclusivity protects the extensive preclinical and clinical trial data required to establish new therapies as safe and effective. Regulatory data protection safeguards this data for a limited period of time, preventing competing firms from free-riding on the data that was generated at great expense. Specifically, biosimilar firms seeking regulatory approval are required to produce their own preclinical and clinical trial data to establish safety and efficacy, or wait the set period of time after which they are able to utilize the innovator’s prior approval in an abbreviated regulatory approval, eliminating the need for independently generated data.

Japan is also the country with the greatest number of foreign priority patent applications at the USPTO. With almost 1.1 million total foreign priority filings and over 389,000 foreign priority filings with the USPTO for utility patents since 2005, Japan is second only to domestic US patent applicants in terms of volume. While quantity does not always mean quality, Japanese filers are also the most successful in front of the USPTO with nearly 78% of patent applications allowed overall and nearly 79% of utility patent applications allowed since 2005.

In all, the world’s nuclear power plants have accrued a total of 16,000 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation and yet there have only been 12 total nuclear power reactor accidents around the entire globe, far fewer than the total number of coal or gas mining explosions the world has experienced over the years. In our ongoing series looking at nuclear power’s potential, prompted by Japan’s short return to nuclear power after its 2011 disaster, we’re taking a quick look back at three major nuclear reactor events to see what the actual fallout has been from those accidents and if we’ve learned our lessons adequately enough to charge forward with making nuclear power a great part of America’s clean energy portfolio.

In 2013, 647,300 industrial design registrations were filed – a 6.4% drop from 2012. The decline in global registrations stems primarily from the slow-down of Chinese manufacturing, which produced 12% fewer registrations than the previous year. After seven years of consecutive growth, 2013’s global registrations of 919,100 designs represents a 3.3% decrease from 2012. In 2013, upwards of three million industrial design registrations were in force.