A Design Amendment (Advisory Council on Intellectual Property Response) Bill 2020 was passed by the Australian Parliament on 30 August 2021. The most notable change by this Bill is the introduction of a 12-month grace period for filing a design application in Australia. This means you can make your design public up to 12 months...Read More

Whilst Patent Offices and courts in various jurisdictions such as US, Europe and UK have rejected the idea of an Artificial Intelligience (AI) system named DABUS to be an inventor, an Australian Federal Court has in Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 held that artificial intelligience (AI) systems can be inventors for the...Read More

IP Australia (AU Trade Marks Office) has recently reported that after filing trade marks in an export market, Australian businesses are three times more likely to enter that market. Also, long term exporters will earn around 30% more export revenue. After filing trade marks in export markets, businesses also become more resilient to exchange rate...Read More

Whilst it is possible for a business to adopt a trade mark for its goods and services without registering the mark, it is preferable to obtain registration of the trade mark. To ensure that a trade mark is registrable in Australia from the outset, you should not adopt a word mark that is descriptive of...Read More

In Australia, patent attorneys are not lawyers, and a professional using the title “lawyer” has completed a law degree, and if they intend to give legal advice, they must also have a current practicing certificate. A lawyer who is “admitted to the Bar”, referred to as a “barrister” is capable of representing clients in most...Read More

In recent years, there has in Australia been considerable flux as to what is patentable for computer-implemented inventions. In the Commissioner of Patents v RPL Central Pty Ltd [2015] FCAFC 177, a Full Bench of the Federal Court found that a computer-implemented method (which the court characterised as a ‘business method’ or ‘scheme’) to be...Read More

Do you wish to protect a new product or device? The Australian Innovation Patent System which provides a quick way to obtain short term patent protection, will soon be phased out on 26 August 2021. An Australian Innovation Patent lasts up to eight years and is designed to protect inventions that do not meet the...Read More

The federal government has announced a $206 million “patent box” scheme to encourage medical and biotech investment. Income derived from medical and biotech patents that have been developed locally, will as of 1st July 2022 be taxed at a concessional rate of 17%. Only granted patents that were applied after 7.30pm on 11 May 2021 will...Read More