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

[Wissam Bentazar]

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

 Wissam Bentazar Thursday, July 16, 2026 - #NeverTooLate, #patents, #UPC, EU trademark, Wissam Bentazar

Half the office is already dreaming of their summer holidays, and if your reading list quietly fell off a cliff this week, you are in good company. The IPKat, blissfully indifferent to the heat, kept going regardless. Here is everything you missed.

Saving you a spot. No rush, finish the reading

Patents

Katfriends Alison Kinch, Connor Yap and Emily White wrote about the new EQE format from the examiner's perspective, offering an inside look at what the changes mean in practice for candidates sitting the reformed papers.

Rose Hughes dug into the responses of CIPA, the PEB and the IP Paralegal Committee to IPReg's sweeping Education Review, mapping out where the three bodies agree (keep workplace training, keep reform proportionate), and where they quietly diverge, with CIPA pushing for substantive change, the PEB largely asking to be left alone, and the Paralegal Committee reframing the question around how IP work is actually delivered in practice today. Notably, both CIPA and the Committee treat AI literacy as a core day-one requirement; the PEB does not mention AI at all.

Katfriend Greg Corcoran returned to the blog with a guest post analysing how the UPC Court of Appeal handled computer implemented inventions in Abbott Diabetes Care v Sinocare, exploring what its approach might mean for UK practice now that the UKIPO has signalled it will align with the EPO.

Claire Gregg took Schrödinger's cat on a trip to New Zealand, unpacking a case where the Commissioner of Patents had to decide whether discretion to correct an error in the patent register extends to situations where, depending on how you look at it, no error may actually exist.

Trade marks

This Kat covered the General Court's judgment in T-591/24, where the mark ARYUNA came out on top against ARMUNIA in the pharma sector, with the Court holding firm on the heightened attention of the relevant pharmaceutical public and finding no likelihood of confusion despite the visual and phonetic proximity of the two signs.

Marcel Pemsel examined a situation where a trade mark made up of descriptive elements had gained acquired distinctiveness through use, but the General Court still refused registration, asking the trickier question of whether that kind of distinctiveness can ever be sufficient to establish inherent distinctiveness in the first place.

UPC

Annsley Merelle Ward AKA The UPCKat reported on the one-year anniversary of BSH v Electrolux, revisiting the Court of Appeal's jurisdiction ruling on the "anchor defendant" mechanism and assessing what has changed, and what has not, in how the UPC handles cross-border infringement claims.

She also explored the threshold for establishing imminent infringement under UPC procedure, looking at what level of evidence a claimant needs to satisfy the court that infringement is more likely than not before any actual act has taken place.

IP Events and Opportunities

Katfriend Dinusha Mendis announced that the WIPO-UK Summer School on Intellectual Property is open for registrations, with a discount available for IPKat readers.