Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia

Presentation

The presentation for this seminar is now available

Overview

A Free Public Seminar presented by the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) in association with the Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia (IPTA)

The Raising the Bar reforms signals a Parliamentary intention to reform in Australian patent law two related grounds of validity; the fair basis of claims in a written description and the adequacy of the written description of the invention as claimed. The reform is variously described in government papers as both raising the standard of validity and harmonising Australian patent validity
grounds with their UK counterparts. In this it implies a clear dissatisfaction with the approach taken by the Australian High Court in the two leading cases on point concerning product claims, and an attraction to a principle in UK law known as Biogen sufficiency. Why had Australian case law developed in the way that it had? Are the objectives of the Raising the Bar reforms desirable? Will the reforms meet those objectives in the hands of the courts?

This seminar offers an overview of the reforms and addresses some
of the questions that they give rise to.

Presenter

Associate Professor David Brennan's primary fields of research and teaching are patent and copyright law, with a particular focus upon their interface with other private law regimes such as contract, property and restitution. David is currently undertaking research and writing on: the question of whether copyright infringements not causing lost sales matter; the new fair basis and sufficiency requirements in Australian patent law; the public policy choice between safe-harbour copyright exceptions and public law graduated response regimes; issues of attribution of performership in the Australian film industry, and the boundary between natural phenomena and patentable pharmaceuticals.

David provides copyright consultancy services to peak bodies in the Australian copyright industry. In this capacity he has participated extensively in copyright law reform and in royalty-setting determinations. He is a member of the Intellectual Property Committee of the Law Council of Australia and is the editor of the Australian Intellectual Property Journal.

He was a member of the first cohort within the University to undertake its Graduate Certificate of University Teaching.