new innovation strategy
Blog
The UK’s new Innovation Strategy and the importance of patents

In July this year, the UK Government laid out its new Innovation Strategy. In the Innovation Strategy: Leading the future by creating builds on the Plan for Growth, the Government opens up a conversation with businesses on how to make the UK a global hub for innovation by 2035. Although there are some important initiatives that will have a positive impact on R&D, there are also some issues that need to be addressed. Most importantly, the lack of education around the necessity to protect intellectual property via patents.

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shell
Blog
Shell Phones: Nature Inspiring
Innovation

Smartphones are now a huge part of modern life, but with the screens currently made from glass, these are easily broken. When this happens, you are often faced with the dilemma: do you pay a fortune to replace it or make do with peering through the broken glass? A team of Bioengineers at McGill University in Canada may have found a potential solution, looking to nature and the humble mollusc shell.

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Blog
Carbon capture technology:
A solution to climate change?

Carbon capture technology: A solution to climate change?

Climate change and how to achieve net zero as quickly as possible is an issue dominating the planet. Many initiatives to reduce emissions are already in place. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reducing emissions alone is not enough to achieve the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and limit future temperature increases to 1.5 degrees. It is also necessary to install technologies capable of removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Carbon capture technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC) may be able to do exactly that.

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DABUS
Blog
DABUS accepted as first AI inventor

DABUS Accepted As First AI Inventor

In June, South African IP officials made the landmark decision to award a patent naming artificial intelligence DABUS as the inventor. Australia’s Federal Court shortly followed suit setting the historic precedent that AI systems can be legally recognised as the inventor in patent applications. With other international jurisdictions rejecting the patent, these controversial decisions sparked a debate across the globe over how AI fits into the fundamental requirements of IP law.

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Blog
Reinventing Pacemakers:
The Battery-less Pacemaker
Cardiac pacemakers have seen a huge success in extending many lives. However, like The Economist pointed out in their article, the design of these lifesaving devices barely evolved since their invention in the late 1950s. Although patients rely on pacemakers to live a healthy life, their battery does not last forever. To solve the problem surrounding the device’s power supply, researchers worldwide are trying to conceive a battery-less pacemaker. And it appears that Yi Zhiran along with his team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University may have succeeded.

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Brazilian
Blog
Brazilian pharmaceutical patents
no longer subject to ANVISA’s
prior approval

Brazilian pharmaceutical patents no longer subject to ANVISA’s prior approval

Back in March this year, the Brazilian Federal Government issued the Provisional Measure No. 1,040/2021. Their aim is to improve the business environment in Brazil and elevate the country’s position in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” ranking. President Bolsonaro has now sanctioned this measure and the corresponding Law No 14.195 entered into force on August 26th, 2021. More…

Brazilian Supreme Court
Blog
Brazilian Supreme Court abolishes
sole paragraph of Article 40

In the nineties, the Brazilian Supreme Court introduced a minimum protection period for patents – the sole paragraph of Article 40.

Article 40. A utility patent will have a term of 20 (twenty) years and a utility model patent term of 15 (fifteen) years, counted from the filing date.

Sole. The term will not be less than 10 (ten) years for utility patents and 7 (seven) years for utility model patents, counted from grant, except when the BRPTO is barred from proceeding with the substantive examination of the application, due to proven pending judicial decision or for reasons of “force majeure”.

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minesoft support
Blog
An update from Minesoft Support

Mie Rasmussen, Head of Support and Training explains how Minesoft is using online training solutions to assist users while working from home.

This year, the way we do training has changed quite dramatically. Previously, the Minesoft Support team provided a lot of in-house training and held bi-annual PatBase Training courses across Europe every spring and autumn. With travel still limited and many people working from home, we have been focussing our efforts on virtual training and building our suite of e-learning solutions instead. We look forward to restarting customer visits and European training courses as soon as it is possible to responsibly travel abroad again. In the meantime, the Minesoft Support are running free module-based training sessions which are already proving to be extremely popular. The sessions will be run as a 1:1 or group training with a member of Minesoft’s experienced support team.

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