The short answer is that the Australian Patents Office will grant patents for software that has a technical purpose which is connected...

Both Australia and China have two grades of patents. The top grade is harder to obtain than the lower grade, but the top grade lasts...

The short answer is 'no'. Perpetual motion machines allegedly produce endless motion without any external source of energy. However, all machines naturally lose energy due to friction, heat and sound. Therefore, no machine can be 100% efficient and run perpetually. In practice, perpetual machines are impossible to build. They do not work. Therefore, the Patents Offices can reject such applications on the grounds that the claimed invention does not achieve the use promis

A patent can only claim one invention. Sometimes during the course of examination, an Examiner identifies more than one invention in the...

Methods of medical treatment are patentable in Australia, but not in New Zealand. The Australian High Court decision of Apotex Pty Ltd v...

In the Patent Office decision of First Principles, Inc. [2011] APO 1 (5 January 2011), the Hearing Officer Phil Spann refused standard...

A person or company that has been unjustifiably threatened with patent infringement litigation may seek an injunction to prevent the...

Recipes are most effectively protected by the law of trade secrets, rather than copyright or patents. ​Well known secret recipes were...

The case of Kafataris v Davis [2016] FCAFC 134 shows that you only disclose your invention to interested third parties under a...

In the case of D'Arcy v Myriad Genetics Inc [2015] HCA 35, the High Court of Australia unanimously determined that the isolated nucleic...

If you ask someone to sign a confidentiality agreement before you disclose your provisional patent application to them, then you can sue them for breach of confidentiality if they steal your idea, even if your patent is not yet granted. In almost all cases, a dishonest person won't run with your exact idea, but will run their own variation of your invention. Therefore, its important that the confidentiality agreement requires that recipient assigns their rights in any vari

The Full Federal Court of 5 judges held in Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMS) v Apotex Pty Ltd [2015] FCAFC 2 that a patent will be invalid for lack of novelty based on a disclosure in a previously published document (so called "prior art") if the prior art contains directions which, if followed, would inevitably result in the patented invention. But if more than one outcome is possible from the directions in the prior art, the patent is not invalid. This case builds on prev

The High Court affirmed that methods of medical treatment can be patented in Apotex Pty Ltd v Sanofi-Aventis Australia Pty Ltd [2013] HCA 50. Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH was the registered owner of a patent which claimed a method of preventing or treating psoriasis by using a compound called leflunomide. Apotex Pty Ltd made a generic version of leflunomide to treat rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. However, most people with psoriatic arthritis will develop