Never Too Late: If you missed the IPKat last week!

Current stance on

generative AI compliance: Blep

It says something about 2026 that you cannot get through a single week of IP news without artificial intelligence turning up uninvited. Last week it managed it twice, in two corners of the law you would not expect to meet. Add a busy run of patent decisions across three continents, and there was plenty to keep you reading while the rest of the internet argued about stolen chocolate. Here is the catch up.

Patents

Rose Hughes pushed back on the growing worry that AI in the patent profession is heading for a price crash, taking apart the "bubble" and "affordability" arguments and questioning the assumptions behind the claim that firms will soon be priced out of their tokens.

Claire Gregg reported from the High Court of Australia, where a five-judge bench heard the appeal in Otsuka v Sun Pharma on whether formulation patents qualify for patent term extension. With a decision expected to take a few months, she set out the competing textual and policy arguments that will shape the answer.

Jocelyn Bosse covered the end of a long running EU saga, as the European Parliament passed the new genomic techniques Regulation and, along the way, rejected the last minute amendments that would have pulled the patent debate back into the spotlight.

Trade marks

In a fittingly timed guest post, Katfriend Alex Sutcliffe (Reddie & Grose) explored a World Cup clash happening well away from the pitch, walking through the brewing fight over FIFA's GOLDEN BALL application and the opposition from the owners of BALLON D'OR, a tangle that could feed into the wider FIFA and UEFA rivalry.

In another guest contribution, Katfriend Thomas Hoeren examined a Berlin court's refusal to grant an injunction over AI-generated search summaries pointing shoppers toward perfume "dupes", with the court holding that the search engine had not itself used the claimant's marks in the sense required by the EUTMR.