IP Review Summer 2018

12 IP review summer 2018 When a patent is filed in a country that is a signatory of the Paris Convention or a member of the World Trade Organisation, the Applicant, or their successor in title, may, within twelve months, apply for protection in all the other member countries. This is known as the right to claim priority. This allows the later applications to be treated as if they were filed on the same day as the initial application for the purpose of determining relevant prior art and for assessing patentability. This right to claim priority is enjoyed by the Applicant who filed the initial application, whether this is a natural person or an entity with legal personality (e.g. a corporation). Where the Applicant is multiple persons, they are generally treated as each owning a share of an indivisible legal right. In view of the fact the right to claim priority is an indivisible right, it is a principle of European case law that, in the situation where an initial application has multiple joint Applicants, a later application has to name all the Applicants of the initial application to enjoy a valid claim to priority from the initial application. Alternatively, if the Applicant of the later application is not the person who filed the initial application, the Applicant must be that person’s successor in title when the later application is filed. In practice, this means that an assignment from the Applicant of the initial application to his successor must take place before the filing date of the later priority claiming application. In the case of the CRISPR decision, the CRISPR gene editing technology provides a cheap, efficient and easy way to precisely edit DNA. As such, the patents and applications directed to this technology have received much attention and are of high value. Priority: lessons to be learnt In recent months, the issue of priority at the European Patent Office has been brought to the forefront of people’s minds in light of the high profile decision to revoke a patent covering the gene editing technology CRISPR. Patents