Latest Patent World

The September 2007 issue of Informa's ten-times-a-year journal Patent World leads with a cover story by Lisa Peets and Mark Young (from US law firm Covington & Burling's London office) on the extent to which, under cover of TRIPs, various governments are pushing the boundaries of compulsory patent licences rather further than many innovative companies would like. While there hasn't yet been a stampede of wealthy nations bringing their complaints to the World Trade Organization, the option remains open - though now that compulsory patent licences have come into fashion, more than a century after the Paris Convention first mooted their legality - they look collectively like a genie that is not going to slip back into the jar.

Another promising feature in this issue is "Legislation v Case Law" which, despite its uninformativeand somewhat off-putting title, turns out to be a comparative review of the operation of the equivalent of the Bolar exemption to patent infringement in the European Union and Japan. The authors are Anthony Trenton (Denton Wilde Sapte) and Takuho Sha (a Japanese patent attorney whose affiliation is not mentioned but who appears to have become an associate of CIPA earlier this year).

For full details of the current issue click here
For details of an absolutely unrelated Patent World, which has adopted the IPKat's unfavourite light-bulb motif for its logo, click here
The original Bolar exemption here
Recipes for Bolar here and here