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The European Patent Office (EPO) Boards of Appeal (BoA) have issued an important decision addressing the growing intersection of artificial intelligence and patent law. In T 1193/23, decided on April 15, 2025, the Board established crucial precedent regarding the use of AI-generated content. This decision relates specifically to ChatGPT responses used as evidence of how a person skilled in the art would interpret a technical term in a patent claim.

Decision Harmonises EPO Practice with

National Courts and Unified Patent Court (UPC)

Recently the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) of the European Patent Office (EPO) has issued its relatively short, but for the most part decisive, G 1/24 decision providing authoritative guidance on how the claims should be interpreted to assess patentability under Articles 52 to 57 EPC.  This decision reconciles divergent case law of the Boards of Appeal, and we are pleased to observe that the EBoA has committed to harmonising the EPO’s approach to that taken by the downstream national and multinational courts. 

The order in the decision sets out the following. The claims are the starting point and the basis for assessing the patentability of an invention under Articles 52 to 57 EPC. The description and drawings shall always be consulted to interpret the claims when assessing the patentability of an invention under Articles 52 to 57 EPC, and not only if the person skilled in the art finds a claim to be unclear or ambiguous when read in isolation.

WP Thompson was among the winners in SME News Magazine's 2025 UK Legal Awards.

Can a third party or intervener continue an appeal if the original appellant withdraws? This question was raised in case T 1286/23. Though the final decision of this case is still pending, this article aims to provide a view on the judgement’s implications.

The patent under appeal for T 1286/23 relates to a handheld skin cleanser, European patent 2941163, originally granted to Foreo AB. However, this patent was later opposed by a third party, Beurer GmbH, who challenged the patent’s validity. Beurer asserted that the patent was invalid on the grounds that it did not meet the requirements of patentability such as added matter, novelty and inventive step.

The UPC Central Division in Paris has reached a different conclusion from that of the High Court of England and Wales[1] in its recent decision[2] regarding the importance of an expert witness statement in the determination of inventive step. In particular, this decision takes the view that an expert witness, though very knowledgeable on the subject area, may be too qualified to be considered as having the common general knowledge of the skilled person.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) continues their digital transformation project with what is reported to be a new and simpler way to search for UK patents.  The “One IPO Search” tool is now live and will replace the current search tool “Ipsum”.  This is the first of a suite of new tools to bring all IP services under a single system, termed the One IPO system.

An EPO decision has instigated a radical change in the understanding of the last point in which a divisional may be filed.

A decision J1/24 from the Legal Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (see also factually corresponding J2/24) has recently been handed down. J1/24 has radically changed the long‑understood view that a divisional patent application of a European patent application can only be filed up until the day before the date of the mention of grant of a European patent.

Following a criminal complaint filed by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), in September 2024 the criminal court of Munich, Germany has convicted three fraudsters for sending misleading payment requests to trade mark owners.

The defendants’ conduct was considered commercial fraud, leading to a sentence of 22 months imprisonment for each defendant and the confiscation of €200,000 (the amount unlawfully obtained) to be used for compensation.

What’s the UPC and what’s changing?

The commencement of the new Unified Patent Court (UPC) and Unitary Patent System on 1^st June 2023, was the culmination of decades of work to further harmonise and unify the patent law landscape in Europe. With the arrival of the new court, rights holders have been granted a new forum for litigation and patent enforcement which allows a single decision to have a binding effect in multiple national European states, while a single Unitary Patent (UP) can be maintained to preserve rights in all of the UPC signatory states.

From its inception in 2023, the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) has had effect in 17 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Sweden, a region home to more than 330 million people.

WP Thompson was among the winners in SME News Magazine's 2024 UK Legal Awards.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has recently updated its guidelines for examining patent applications relating to artificial intelligence (AI) following the landmark court decision in Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller-General of Patents. This decision has significant implications for the patentability of AI inventions in the UK, particularly those involving artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this article, we explore the key takeaways from the Emotional Perception decision, the updates to the patent examination guidelines, and provide practical advice for those seeking to protect their AI innovations.

In its decision of 17 April 2024*, the EU General Court has confirmed that the trade mark “Pablo Escobar” must be refused registration on the ground that it is contrary to public policy or to accepted principles of morality.

The EPO is due to increase its fees on 1st April, 2024.  There are some large increases planned in relation to renewal fees, particularly the third- and fourth-year renewal fees that are to increase by approximately 30%.

High growth businesses, despite experiencing rapid expansion in terms of revenue, profits, and market capitalization, often possess few tangible assets.  However, they frequently own intangible assets, such as goodwill, brands, digital assets, intellectual property (IP), and know-how.

To continue to grow, these high growth businesses must consider ways to finance their expansion.  Unlike tangible assets, it is difficult to value these intangible assets because they have no physical shape or form.  The question is, how do these ‘tangible asset poor’ businesses raise funding via traditional methods such as bank loans?

On 15 January 2024 the validation agreement between the European Patent Organisation (EPO) and Georgia entered into force.  Georgia now joins the four other non-EPO member states Morocco, Republic of Moldova, Tunisia, and Cambodia to become one of the “Validation States” of the EPO. 

With the current agreement’s entry into force and the extension agreement with Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of countries for which patent protection can be obtained on the basis of a single European patent application rises to 45. Applicants can now effectively obtain patent protection in Georgia using the same procedure before the EPO as for obtaining national patents in the 39 member states.

In a long-running dispute centred around whether DABUS, an Artificial Intelligence(AI)-based creativity machine, can be named as an inventor of two GB patents, the UK Supreme Court finally issued the long-awaited decision. Dr Stephen Thaler, the creator and owner of DABUS has ultimately failed in his landmark bid to register two GB patent applications protecting inventions created by DABUS, specifically naming the machine as inventor. The Supreme Court has ruled that while AI machines may have the ability to generate work, these machines are not inventors within the meaning of the 1977 Act.

Our offices will be closed on Christmas and Boxing Days 25 & 26 December 2023 and New Year’s Day 1 January 2024.

In a recent High Court decision, Justice Mann overturned the UK Intellectual Property Office's (UKIPO) refusal to grant a patent for an artificial intelligence system utilising artificial neural networks (ANNs) to recommend similar songs to users[1].

The invention developed by Emotional Perception AI Ltd leverages a deep learning model based on ANNs. ANNs comprise layers of interconnected nodes like neurons in a brain, which process and transmit data signals. By training the ANN model on numerous song pairs labelled with both musical properties and semantic descriptions, it learns to map songs with proximate vectors in musical property space to songs with similar vectors in semantic space. Once trained, the ANN model can analyse an input song's properties, generate a corresponding semantic vector, and find the songs with the closest vectors in its database to recommend.

The site of Alan Turing's pioneering codebreaking achievements during World War II recently hosted another momentous gathering—the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Summit.

Held on November 1-2, 2023, and convened by the UK government, the summit brought together government representatives and industry leaders from major AI powers to address the opportunities and risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence.

We at WP Thompson are proud to recognise the contributions of our Dr Julian Potter and Ranveer Riyat in the authorship of a new book titled "Artificial Intelligence and Patents: An International Perspective on Patenting AI-Related Inventions."

Summary of Facts and Decision

In a recent decision J5/23, the Legal Board of Appeal rejected a request by the applicant to record a transfer of the application from Gyrus ACMI Inc. to Olympus Medical Systems Corporation on the European Patent Register.  The applicant relied on the use of an e-signature to sign an assignment document and, when rejected by the EPO, tried to rely on a previous publication by the EPO that e-signatures would be accepted for the purposes of assignment documents.

The relevant legal provision to be applied is Article 72 EPC, which states that for a valid assignment of a European patent application, the request must be made in writing and signed by all parties to the contract.  The key question in this decision was the definition of the word “signature” and what the role of electronic signatures play in this Article.

We are delighted to celebrate our ranking as a leading Intellectual Property firm in Chambers 2024 rankings.  This year’s ranking marks the twelfth consecutive year in which WP Thompson has been recognised as leading Intellectual Property firm by Chambers.

On the 1^st of November this year the European Patent Office’s (EPO’s) 10-day rule will come to an end, removing the safeguard for late filed submissions whilst providing a more consistent and simplified approach to the calculation of deadlines in Europe. 

A significant shift in the assessment of the validity of priority claims has been confirmed by the EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) in the handing down of its combined decision for G1/22 and G2/22. In addition to confirming the competency of the EPO to assess the validity of Paris Convention priority claims, the new decision lessens the restrictions on the right to claim priority in European applications stemming from PCT applications which have been filed with different applicants or groups of applicants listed for different designated states, and which claim priority to an earlier application identifying only one of these applicants or groups of applicants.

A known risk when trying to register a trade mark is the existence of earlier conflicting trade mark rights owned by third parties, which may be an obstacle to the registration of your trade mark. This is particularly true in countries such as China and the US, where the local trade mark office refuses registration of a trade mark on its initiative if they believe there is a risk of confusion with an earlier registered mark, giving the applicant a deadline to respond.