Comptrollers' opinions -- and the Kats'

Under UK patent law it is possible for an interested party to pay a modest sum of money and receive, in return, a non-binding but potentially influential opinion from the Comptroller as to whether a granted patent is (i) valid or (ii) infringed. The UK Intellectual Property Office has just refreshed its list of Requests for Opinions, which you can see here.

Right: having an opinion is the easy bit -- the hard job is ploughing through the prior art ...

This useful table contains information about opinion requests and the stage that each request has reached. You can thus discover (i) if there's still time to file your own observations on a request or whether the period for doing so has expired, (ii) if the UK-IPO has issued an opinion, (iii) whether the person who filed the request has withdrawn it and (iv) whether the request has been refused.

On visiting the site today the IPKat noticed that, of all the many requests listed, only one was still within its not-too-late-to-make-observations phase, that being EP 0605800 ('Resistors from compound material and method for their fabrication') belonging to Isabellenhutte Heusler GmbH KG. If you get a move-on, you should be okay since you can post your observations regarding its novelty and inventive step by 24 September 2008. the request for an opinion comes from the respectable firm of patent attorneys Maguire Boss, which leads the Kats to suspect that the firm is fronting for a client which would prefer not to be identified.

Merpel says, the UK-IPO can do us all a little favour by tidying up this page. The list contains 21 requests made this year, 27 from 2007, 30 from 2006 and 4 from 2005. Of these, only one is still 'live'. Why not save site-users from Scrollers' Mouse-Finger and stick the 'dead' ones in little archive boxes?