A User's Guide to Patents, Fifth Edition provides guidance on the areas of European and UK patent law and procedure that are most important in day-to-day practice.

This new edition sets out how patents can be obtained, exploited and enforced and addresses wider public policy aspects of patents and their economic significance, as well as past and likely future trends that affect legal practitioners. It is essential reading for IP practitioners, solicitors and barristers, patent attorneys, in-house lawyers, management executives and inventors.

Unique selling points:
Explains how patents can be exploited and enforced by reference to the most recent UK and EPO case law
Identifies and discusses the different patent law issues that can arise in specific industrial sectors
Full tabulation of all English patent validity and infringement decisions given after full trial since 1997
Addresses wider public policy aspects of patents and their economic significance, as well as past and likely future trends in the field, both in Europe and internationally

The following relevant developments are included:
The new UK law as to infringement by equivalents following Actavis v Lilly (UKSC 2017)
The degree to which new types of plant, produced by using certain modern biotechnological techniques, can be patented in the light of the exclusion for 'products obtained by essentially biological processes' and the ongoing controversy as to this between the EPO, the EPO Boards of Appeal and the EU
The developing case law in the UK and the EPO on plausibility in the context of insufficiency and obviousness
The Unjustified Threats Act 2017 and other procedural developments, such as those involving Arrow type declarations of obviousness
Developments in standards related patent litigation, as in Unwired Planet v Huawei (Patents Court 2017, CA 2018)

This title is included in Bloomsbury Professional's Intellectual Property and IT online service.

Trevor Cook is an English qualified solicitor with over 35 years' experience in the field of intellectual property, and notably global patent litigation, who has acted in many of the leading patent infringement cases before the English courts. At the beginning of 2014 Mr Cook joined Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP as a partner in New York from Bird & Bird LLP in London, where he had been a partner since 1981. He is chair of the British Copyright Council and was for several years president of the UK group of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property. He is on the World Intellectual Property Organisation list of arbitrators.